Plano Reads: Disappearing Earth
Register and join us at the Brown Bag Book Club at noon on Thursday, May 27, 2021 for a virtual discussion.
Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips
Also available as an eBook
A chilling crime. Alyona and Sophia, two sisters ages 11 and 8, are playing on a public beach when offered a ride home by a friendly stranger. The girls are seen by a young woman disappearing into a shiny black car. The authorities in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city on Russia’s remote Kamchatka peninsula find nothing. Three years earlier a Native girl in a village far north of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky ran away…or did she? Over the year following the disappearance of the sisters, these two stories are interwoven through the lives of those touched by the disappearances as the ripple effects of a single event is felt across the city.
The shadows of loss and fragmentation in beautiful and remote Kamchatka with its uneasy coexistence of cultures are at the heart of the story. The desire to learn what happened will keep you hooked from the very beginning.
In fresh and unpredictable scenes depicting broken friendships and failed marriages, strained family gatherings, drunken sauna parties, a camping trip, and rehearsals of a Native dance troupe, Phillips’ spellbinding prose is saturated with sensuous nuance and emotional intensity as she subtly traces the shadows of Russia’s past and illuminates today’s daunting complexities of gender and identity, expectations and longing.
Donna Seaman, Booklist (2019)
“Phillips, a Fulbright fellow whose work has appeared in Slate and the Atlantic, has written a knock-out novel that combines literary heft with a propulsive plot.” – Library Journal
Register and join us at the Brown Bag Book Club at noon on Thursday, May 27, 2021 for a virtual discussion.