The daughter of a reindeer herder from the north, at college in the city, finds her controlling boyfriend clamping down harder than ever. Another young girl with a single mom loses her best friend to new restrictions imposed by the other girl's anxious mother. The rest of the book is a series of linked stories about a number of different women on the peninsula, all with the shadow of the missing girls hanging over them as a year goes by since their disappearance. After he drives right past the intersection that leads to the apartment they share with their mother, they disappear from their previous lives and, to a large extent, from the narrative. They are offered a ride home by a seemingly kind stranger. In the first chapter of Phillips' immersive, impressive, and strikingly original debut, we meet sisters Alyona and Sophia, ages 11 and 8, amusing themselves one August afternoon on the rocky shoreline of a public beach on the waterfront of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city on Russia's remote Kamchatka peninsula. A year in the lives of women and girls on an isolated peninsula in northeastern Russia opens with a chilling crime.
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