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

Their supervisor—the boring one—squinted at Max's screen. "What type was he?" he asked Oksana. "Russian, you think? Or maybe Tajik? Did he look dirty?"

Their pregnant coworker stared straight ahead. Oksana raised a loose hand. "He looked like any other guy. Nothing interesting."

The supervisor pressed on. "What about his hair color? The shape of his eyes?"

"The shape of his eyes! You're asking if I stopped to chat about his genealogy? Was he half Korean, a quarter Chukchi?" Oksana laughed, a noise pinched and bitter. "I saw a big man. A big car. Two little kids."

"She saw enough," Max said.

Katya had flinched from the force of her inappropriate desire: the more Max spoke about witness statements, police debriefings, and grieving mothers, the more she wanted him. A confident man volunteering to undo danger. To find this eager heart inside this immaculate body ... she hadn't thought it was possible.

Well. It wasn't, not entirely. The Golosovskaya sisters were still missing, and Max hadn't gone out with the search parties since the first of the month.

The tent tonight was only his latest plan to fall apart between promise and execution. Usually there was something endearing about that pattern—Max's ideas, his excitement, his fumbled follow-through—but Katya had not found it cute to watch the sun set over the mountains when they were hours away from this campsite. The trees on either side of the road north had darkened while Max kept turning his phone to try to recover a GPS signal. In came Katya's private, slippery distress.

The more time they spent with each other, the more she learned. If, one day, Petropavlovsk was flooded with lava, Katya feared she would know exactly which handsome researcher at the institute must have overlooked every sign of an imminent eruption. Max could not always keep track of what was important. He did not seem as excellent to her now.

For the length of this weekend, though, it would not matter. The smoke from their fire mixed with the steam off the hidden springs, making the night dense. Charred wood, rich sulfur, and cold earth: the smells of nostalgia. Her family had loved this place. After the USSR collapsed, there were no longer any restrictions on travel, no stop to movement; the Soviet military bases that had constrained the entire peninsula were shuttered, so Kamchatka's residents could finally explore their own land. Katya's family had gone as far north as Esso to meet the natives with their reindeer herds, west to see steaming craters, and south to pull caviar out of what had become unpatrolled lakes. She spent her youth in the brief reckless period between the Communists' rigidity and Putin's strength, and though she had grown into a boundary enforcer, inspecting imports and issuing citations, within herself there remained a post-Soviet child. Some part of her did crave the wild.

Katya allowed herself to blend with the darkness. "My parents used to take us camping every weekend," she said to Max.

"Yeah?"

"Practically." She took her last bite of fish and he passed her a soft slice of cheese. "As soon as the snow melted, we were out in the woods. They would give me and my brothers projects—following animal tracks, or finding different types of trees."

He touched her waist. "They were probably giving themselves some time to be alone."

"I don't think so," she said.

"Probably, though, right?"

When she was ten years old, her parents were ... She had to count it. Her mother had only been thirty-two. Younger than Katya was now. She pictured them then, their long limbs colliding, and shivered. "Stop," she said, batting Max's chest.

"I'm joking," Max said. "I'm sure their intentions were completely educational. How'd you do with the projects? Find all your trees?"

"Of course we did," she said. "I was the oldest. I told them we weren't coming back without a full catalog of leaves."

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.