The Tsar Of Love And Techno - Hardcover

"Shares much with David Mitchell's expansive Cloud Atlas, and it wears its blend of dry humour and tragedy very well... impressive" (Observer Ben East)

"This book will burn itself into your heart. It's a collection of interlocking short stories that stand alone but also fit together, piece by delicate piece, to form an astonishing whole... It's funny, moving and beautiful" (New York Times)

"Masterful ... mesmerising ... Like Nabokov, Marra is a writer for whom essential truths are found in detail... The nine interlocking stories grip from the off with their dry tone and meticulously realised worlds of totalitarian life and its aftermath" (Sarah Gilmartin Irish Times)

"Gripping... painful and powerful, with welcome flashes of ironic humour, too" (John Sunyer Financial Times)

"Marra creates an unnerving story of a world, then and now, dominated by untouchable authorities that operate at every social level... a writer of intelligence, wit and sensitivity, adept at telling stories that entertain but also create the sensation that they are not so strange as fiction" (George Berridge Times Literary Supplement)

"A work of extraordinary confidence and empathy... a distinctive and heady fictional cocktail... thoroughly entertaining" (Liam Hess Literary Review)

"Marra’s sharp prose is alternatively ironic and poetic, giving a sympathetic voice to the most dispossessed characters...A memorable book on memory and how we try to remember’" (Stephen Coulson Lady)

"A very Russian nostalgia and sense of narrative resonate in this story of memories and how we remember, that runs from Stalin's purges to modern war-ravaged Chechnya. The lives of sympathetically voiced criminals, mercenaries, lovers and artists are interwoven in precisely crafted plotlines" (Lady, Book of the Year)

"Addictive" (Michelle Dean Guardian)

"A superbly artful collection" (BBC Culture)

*** A Granta Best of Young American Novelists 2017 ***

The Tsar of Love and Techno begins in 1930s Leningrad, where a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting of a dacha inside a box of images due to be altered. The mystery behind this painting threads together the stories that follow, which take us through a century and introduce a cast of characters including a Siberian beauty queen, a young soldier in the battlefields of Chechnya, the Head of the Grozny Tourist Bureau, a ballerina performing for the camp director of a gulag and many others.

Praise for A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

‘Storytelling of magical purity, illuminated by hope... Marra is a magnificent writer’ The Times

‘Extraordinary... a 21st-century War and Peace’ New York Times Book Review

‘An absolute masterpiece’ Sarah Jessica Parker, Entertainment Weekly