We pause with students from Even reindeer-herding families from the northern tundra with the wives and children of men far away for various kinds of work, frustrated and bored by ice and darkness with the strict, slick women who are succeeding in Putin’s Russia but are subject, in the end, to the same structural inequalities as their less prosperous sisters. We are in Petropavlovsk, on Russia’s far eastern Kamchatka peninsula, where it’s a very long way to any other city details of daily life will be exotic to most anglophone readers, and the inhabitants, both indigenous and Russian, are shaped by their relationships to Soviet Russia. I was so absorbed I forgot to take notes for most of the first half, not so much because of the tension of the search as because each new domestic world was deftly conjured and fresh. Members of the public join the search, and as the narrative swirls through the city, skipping from one household to another and following different women with each new chapter, the reader is also alert for clues, because how else are you supposed to read the story of missing girls? Husbands and boyfriends track their partners’ movements, worry. Good mothers keep their daughters indoors. Sweet little white girls, left to wander the city in summer while their mother works, are lured into a car and stolen away by a strange man.

J ulia Phillips’s debut seems at first to be the story of missing girls, the one we all know.

Disappearing earth by julia phillips