In Conversation: On Here Lies a Father: A Novel & Disappearing Earth: A Novel

Julia Phillips’ writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Moscow Times, and The Paris Review. She studied Russian at Barnard and secured a Fulbright scholarship to visit Russia. In Disappearing Earth (Vintage), her debut novel, Phillips takes us through the year that follows the disappearance of two sisters – Sophia, 8, and Alyona, 11 – who one August afternoon go missing from a beach on the far-flung Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Russia. The book, a finalist for a National Book Award in Fiction, takes us into the lives of the women and girls of this tightly knit community who are connected by the crime: a witness, a neighbor, a detective, a mother, and a region as complex as it is alluring. The New York Times called it “Superb. ... Brilliant. ... Phillips’s deep examination of loss and longing ... is a testament to the novel’s power.”

Mckenzie Cassidy is a writer, journalist, marketer, and educator. His work has appeared in the anthology Walk Hand in Hand into Extinction: Stories Inspired by True Detective, Flash Fiction Magazine, Florida Weekly, and various newspapers throughout southwest Florida. Here Lies a Father: A Novel (Kaylie Jones Books) is his first published book of fiction. When Ian Daly and his sister Catherine arrive for their wayward father Thomas’ funeral in his small and desolate upstate New York hometown, a secret that was kept from them their entire lives emerges: Their father abandoned two other families, leaving behind two furious wives and several children who never knew their father. His sister and mother want to preserve the carefully constructed myth they’ve created around who Thomas really was. But 15-year-old Ian wants to know and sets out alone to learn the truth about his father’s past and the families he left behind. The book examines the long-term effects shameful secrets have on a family, and how a young man reconstructs his own sense of right and wrong when every value and moral principle he was ever taught was based on a lie. Publishers Weekly called it “an engrossing debut. [Cassidy] convincingly depicts the ways his sensitive, turbulent protagonist navigates the murky period between adolescence and adulthood.”