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​DISAPPEARING EARTH

​One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka peninsula at the northeastern edge of Russia, two girls–sisters, eight and eleven–go missing. In the ensuing weeks, then months, the police investigation turns up nothing. Echoes of the disappearance reverberate across a tightly woven community, with the fear and loss felt most deeply among its women.

Taking us through a year in Kamchatka, Disappearing Earth enters with astonishing emotional acuity the worlds of a cast of richly drawn characters, all connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother. We are transported to vistas of rugged beauty–densely wooded forests, open expanses of tundra, soaring volcanoes, and the glassy seas that border Japan and Alaska–and into a region as complex as it is alluring, where social and ethnic tensions have long simmered, and where outsiders are often the first to be accused. 

In a story as propulsive as it is emotionally engaging, and through a young writer’s virtuosic feat of empathy and imagination, this powerful novel brings us to a new understanding of the intricate bonds of family and community, in a Russia unlike any we have seen before.

​Spellbinding, moving–evoking a fascinating region on the other side of the world–this suspenseful and haunting story announces the debut of a profoundly gifted writer.

International bestseller

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice 

Finalist for the National Book Award, ​National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for Best First Book, New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and Center for Fiction First Novel Prize

Reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Review of Books, Chicago Review of Books, San Francisco Examiner, Boston Globe, Ploughshares, The Believer, The Spectator, USA Today, and Entertainment Weekly

Starred reviews in Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal, BookPage, Shelf Awareness, and Booklist

Selected for the PBS Newshour/New York Times Now Read This Book Club, Indie Next List, Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program, and Junior Library Guild

One of 2019's best books according to The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vanity Fair, Variety, Esquire, Real Simple, The New York Post, Town & Country, Jezebel, The A.V. Club, Barnes & Noble, New York Public Library, Chicago Public Library, Kirkus, Library Journal, CBC, NPR, BookPage, BookBub, Book Riot, USA Today, and Entertainment Weekly

One of the best books of the season according to Vanity Fair, O, Town & Country, The Daily Beast, Southern Living, Domino, Bustle, AARP, The Writer, BookBub, The Week, Publishers Weekly, The Evening Standard, and Esquire

Recommended by The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Goodreads, Refinery 29, PopSugar, theSkimm, Bustle, Entertainment Weekly, USA Today, Newsday, Cosmopolitan, and People

Shortlisted for the ​VCU Cabell First Novelist Award

Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence

Editions of DISAPPEARING EARTH are available or forthcoming from

Kryg (Bulgaria) · China South Booky Culture (China) · Znanje (Croatia) · MOBA (Czech Republic) · Postimees (Estonia) · Siltala (Finland) · Autrement (France) · dtv (Germany) · Metaichmio (Greece) · Tericum (Hungary) · Marsilio (Italy) · Hayakawa (Japan) · Golden Time (Korea) · Balto (Lithuania) · Meulenhoff Boekerij (The Netherlands) · Pax Forlag (Norway) · ​Literackie (Poland) · Mann-Ivanov-Ferber (Russia) · Laguna (Serbia) · Mladinska Knjiga (Slovenia) · Sexto Piso (Spain and Latin America) · Norstedts (Sweden) · Yuan-Liou (Taiwan) · İthaki (Turkey) · ​Knopf/Vintage (US) · ​Scribner (UK)

​"A genuine masterpiece, but one that is easily consumed in a feverish stay-up-all-night bout of reading pleasure. It's as much a portrait of humanity as of a small Kamchatka community."
— Gary Shteyngart

"Julia Phillips is at once a careful cartographer and gorgeous storyteller. Written with passion and patience, this is the story of a people and the land that shapes them. A mystery of two missing girls burns at the center of this astonishing debut, and the complexity of ethnicity, gender, hearth and kin illuminates this question and many more."
— ​Tayari Jones

“A feat of literary suspense. I felt like a wide-eyed kid reading Julia Phillips's Disappearing Earth. I could live in her portrayal of this remote part of the world forever.”
​— Sloane Crosley

“Disappearing Earth is not only a viscerally wide-ranging introduction to the land and culture of the Kamchatka Peninsula, as well as a missing persons thriller—as beautifully written as it was, I still couldn’t turn the pages fast enough—it’s also a wrenching meditation on the agonies of those losses to which we never fully adjust. This is a dazzlingly impressive first novel.”  
— Jim Shepard

“This exquisite debut reads like a secret being whispered to your ears only. Julia Phillips so smoothly evokes the quiet rage, breathtaking tenderness and searing discomfort of a human connection.”
— Suki Kim

“Julia Phillips’s novel is vividly real, but it reads at times like a suspenseful fairy tale. Here are portraits of different women with a shared yearning for autonomy, in a land inhospitable to it. Here, too, is a story in which, against all odds, they do not give up hope. Disappearing Earth is a brave, affecting accomplishment.”
— Christine Schutt

"I cannot speak too highly of Julia Phillips's thrilling, impeccably written and splendidly imagined story, set with rigorous attention to detail in one of the most volcanically dangerous and beautifully remote corners of the planet. An exciting beginning from an author whose literary future looks set to be stellar.”
— Simon Winchester

“Julia Phillips writes in clean, sharp lines that belie an almost frightening depth, and a clarity of eye that renders a complex and gut-wrenching vision of the Kamchatka region and its people. More than once, I gawped at this book: there are no seams, no sentimentality, not a single untrue thought from start to finish. With Disappearing Earth, Phillips accomplishes in her first book what most writers can't glimpse in a lifetime.”
​— Bill Cheng

“Disappearing Earth is a rare achievement: haunting and complex; intense yet subtle; sophisticated yet unputdownable; moving yet never sentimental; foreign yet somehow familiar. And it snaps shut at the end with dark poise. Julia Phillips possesses a unique talent, and I can’t wait for her next book.”
— Lorraine Adams

"Suspenseful, original and compelling, Disappearing Earth is a strange and haunting voyage into a strange and haunting world—the faraway Kamchatka in Russia's Far East, which is brought by this debut novelist to eerie, vibrant and unsettling life."
— ​Simon Sebag Montefiore

“Brilliant, spectacular—a wonderful book. Julia Phillips’s exquisite, detailed writing drew me in from the very first page of Disappearing Earth. I fell in love with each and every poignantly rendered character, even as I couldn’t keep my eyes off the central mystery of the two missing girls. The novel is both a riveting page-turner and a gorgeous exploration of love, one that circles around a magnetic core of loss. It has lodged itself deep in my heart.”
— Jean Kwok