Michael asked Julia Phillips:

How did you convey the RFE’s alienation and otherworldliness? (I’ve been to Kamchatka twice, as well as Primorye.) The book does a powerful job exploring conflicts: police and civilians, ethnic Russians and native populations, educated people and commoners. Amid the mystery and overlapping plots is deep exploration of the struggle of eking out a marginal life in the distant outskirts of post-Soviet Russia.

Julia Phillips Michael, it means so much that the book resonates with your own experiences in Kamchatka and the Russian Far East. That is a dream come true for me, really. It is an exceptional part of the world.

Working on this story was an enormous education. I spent a long time very much in love with Kamchatka; working on the book, writing into that obsessive love, helped me process what about that place I found so compelling. It offered a way to explore so many different aspects of the peninsula, including (especially?) its geographic, political, and cultural conflicts and contrasts. What a gift to hear now that some of that feeling made its way onto the page and to you.

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