Since its May 2019 debut through Knopf, Disappearing Earth was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s ten best books of the year. “I was grateful I had done the work of relationship-building at an earlier moment,” Phillips said. The change, Phillips says, was palpable: at one Kamchatka bathhouse, visitors wiped their feet on an American flag as they crossed the sauna’s threshold. The government had cracked down on protests. By that time, Russia’s economy was recovering from crisis. The third moment occurred in 2015, when Phillips returned to Kamchatka to gather colorful details about contemporary life in the remote peninsula. Occupy Wall Street protests had overtaken lower Manhattan, while anti-corruption protests swept Russia. At that time, Putin was preparing to resume the presidency. The second was in 2011, when Phillips traveled to Kamchatka as a Fulbright fellow, intending to write a novel. The first of these moments came in 2008, when Russia had just invaded Georgia. Her sojourn there led to Disappearing Earth, a novel set in the Far East that centers on a community’s response to the kidnapping of two girls. Īuthor Julia Phillips says three significant political moments framed her time in Russia. Julia Phillips is the debut author of the nationally bestselling novel Disappearing Earth. Abby Latour is a journalist and MA student in Russian Studies at NYU.
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