One August afternoon, on the shoreline of the Kamchatka Peninsula at the northeastern tip of Russia, two girls - sisters, ages eight and eleven - go missing. In the girls' tightly-woven community, everyone must grapple with the loss. But the fear and danger is felt most profoundly among the women of this isolated place. Taking us one chapter per month across a year on Kamchatka, this powerful novel connects the lives of characters changed by the sisters' abduction.
Julia Phillips is a Fulbright Fellow whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Moscow Times, and The Paris Review. She lives in Brooklyn.