Excerpt from Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

In the first days after the kidnapping, Katya was nervous, touchy, about everything. She looked at her friends like they were aliens. She could not fit the missing sisters in with the crimes she knew. Bribery, for example, Katya understood—she encountered corruption all the time at her job. Just today, inspecting the cargo of a new Canadian importer, she and the other customs officers discovered thousands of live turtles, their yellow arms waving in the light. ("What'd you do with them all?" Max had asked her this evening as they left city limits. "Threw them in the bay," Katya said. "No. Come on. Seized them for destruction." He'd pouted and she'd laughed.)

So smugglers, sure. Or poachers, trespassers, arsonists, drunk drivers, mauled hunters, men throttling each other in the course of an argument, migrant workers falling off the scaffolding at construction sites, people freezing to death over the winter months ... these were regular items in Kamchatka's news. Two stolen little girls were a different matter. Oksana had passed only ten meters from the crime as it happened but managed to joke about it; meanwhile Katya studied the missing-person posters and frightened herself by thinking of what abductors she might run into one day.

"I'm obligated to do this," Oksana had told Katya during their drive. "I'm not going to stop going to work because I happened to walk Malysh at a shitty time." She passed another slow car. "Besides, what else am I going to do? Spend all weekend relaxing in my happy home?"

Katya had known Oksana more than a decade. Even when they met, as graduate students, Oksana had been cold, guarded, but intriguing. A fine distraction on a long trip. She spent the rest of the car ride briefing Katya on her colleagues. Boring, sloppy, and pregnant, Oksana said of the three other institute researchers in the group. "Don't bother with any of them. At least we'll have each other." Then Katya followed Oksana into a park cabin to discover a man who looked like a film star.

"Who, Max?" Oksana said. "Ugh."

From the first night, he put that tug in Katya's stomach. Petropavlovsk wasn't that big and the number of thirty-six-year-old singles in town even smaller, but she had somehow missed him for all these years, until Nalychevo. The two of them kept slipping off to fumble under each other's clothes behind the woodpile. They could hear the group's voices through the cabin windows. When Max whispered caution into Katya's mouth, she only wrapped her arms around his neck and pulled him closer. She wanted his beauty to blot out all fear.

And now Max and Katya were well on their way to domesticity. Max's coworkers had moved on from their initial burst of gossip; even Oksana was too preoccupied with her home life to do much more than shrug when Katya brought him up. Katya's male colleagues had backed off on asking her to drinks, and her female colleagues treated her marginally less like an old maid. On weekends, Max and Katya cycled through the city together. They kayaked the bay and barbecued by the ocean shore. He took her a few times to his climbing gym. This autumn trip to the hot springs was Katya's initiative.

Max stood to fetch her a strip of salmon. The long shadow of dirt showed on his thermal top. I love him, she practiced telling herself. It still sounded strange.

Sloppy, Oksana had warned Katya about him during their car ride, before any of them knew a warning was necessary. Once they arrived at the cabin, Katya was too busy picturing him pressed against the birch logs to listen. The Nalychevo group, like the rest of the city, had been hungry for news about the girls' disappearance. Oksana's story did not satisfy them. They looked instead to Max, who talked up his role in the volunteer search parties.

"Oksana's giving herself too little credit. Thanks to her, we have a description of the guy and his car. We're going to keep looking until we find them," he said. He even passed around the girls' school pictures on his phone.

Excerpted from Disappearing Earth by Julia Phillips. Copyright © 2019 by Julia Phillips. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.