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.”
