The novel centres around the character of Ken Guy, a typical, working-class man, who owns and runs Hideaway Self-Storage with the help of his assistant Bruce. What starts out as a simple tale of suburban working life in Springwood, Brisbane, soon evolves into a compelling mystery of human disappearance and mental deterioration. The ordinary really can become extraordinary as David Cohen reveals in his second novel, Disappearing Off the Face of the Earth. Warning: This review contains plot spoilers. Melbourne, Victoria: Transit Lounge Publishing, 2017. But a tidy ending does not diminish Phillips’s deep examination of loss and longing, and it is a testament to the novel’s power that knowing what happened to the sisters remains very much beside the point.A Review of David Cohen’s ‘Disappearing off the Face of the Earth’Ĭohen, David, Disappearing off the Face of the Earth. And if there is a single misstep in Phillips’s nearly flawless novel, it arrives with the tidy ending that seems to serve the needs of a genre rather than those of this particularly brilliant novel. There will be those eager to designate Disappearing Earth a thriller by focusing on the whodunit rather than what the tragedy reveals about the women in and around it.

She describes the region with a cartographer’s precision and an ethnographer’s clarity.

It’s a well-worn cliché of book jacket copy to say that place is as important a character as any of the people in a book, and yet the women who populate Phillips’s novel are so intrinsically and intelligently identified with their region that it’s impossible to understand or even consider them without Phillips’s precise evocation of Kamchatka. What appears to be a collection of fragments, the remains of assorted personal disasters and the detritus of a lost empire, is in truth capable of unity. This story will be retold by the novel’s close, just as the novel will retell itself. The ending ignites an immediate desire to reread the chapters leading up to it: incidents and characters that seemed trivial acquire new meanings. It is the web itself that provides the solution. The official investigators in Disappearing Earth dither at the story’s periphery and come up empty-handed. But for Phillips the intricate web linking her characters is not a mystery to be uncovered by a solitary detective.

all that shared personal history becomes a breeding ground for intrigue.

Petropavlovsk uncannily resembles a small, overlooked city in the American West, with its old-timers praising the way things used to be, its restless youth dreaming of metropolitan glamour and escape. As remote as this world is, readers will find it strangely familiar.

Book review disappearing earth