"To me, shock or rampant anxiety is one of the most interesting things to write about," she explained when I asked about writing in the language of shock.
Information comes through in spurts time feels disconnected. As the characters work their way through longing and grief, there's the recurring sense that what they're really doing is wading through the recognition that their worlds do not look the way they wanted them to. It is the wording of these women's stories that struck me as so similar to the anecdote from Phillips' childhood. However, the narrative soon spirals inwards until readers find themselves rethinking the characters they thought they knew. What unfolds from there feels, at first, like a collection of isolated storylines about unrelated strangers.
Agent: Suzanne Gluck, WME Entertainment.Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. This novel signals the arrival of a mighty talent. Phillips’s exquisite descriptions of the desolate landscape and the “empty, rolling earth” are masterful throughout, as is her skill at crafting a complex and genuinely addictive whodunit. The discovery leads to a truly nail-biting climax and the novel’s shocking conclusion that even eagle-eyed readers might not see coming.
The penultimate chapter unites some of the book’s disparate threads, and follows Sofia and Alyona’s anxious and emotionally ravaged mother, Marina, as she meets a photographer at a solstice festival who uncovers a potential link to an earlier unsolved missing-persons case and an important clue about who the perpetrator of both crimes might be. “April” peeks into the day-to-day of a policeman’s restless wife, who, while on maternity leave, is haunted by missed opportunities and “ things darker, stranger, out of bounds.” In “May,” shrewlike Oksana, the abduction’s only witness, severs ties with a colleague after the colleague’s absentminded husband loses Oksana’s beloved dog. The subsequent 12 chapters, taking place during the months over the following year, chart the impact of the potential kidnapping-and the destructive effect of longing and loss-and play out in a series of interconnected and equally riveting stories about others in the surrounding area. In the opening chapter of Phillips’s exceptional and suspenseful debut, two sisters-Sofia, 8, and Alyona, 11-vanish from a beach on the Kamchatka Peninsula in northeastern Russia, and their disappearance sends ripples throughout the close-knit community.
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