The Tsar Of Love And Techno - Softcover

"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)

The Tsar of Love and Techno begins in 1930s Leningrad, where a failed portrait artist is tasked by Soviet censors to erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting of a dacha inside a box of images meant to be altered. The mystery behind this painting reverberates through the stories that follow, which take us through a century as they thread together 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

Marra is the winner of: the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Barnes and Noble Fiction Discover Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pushcart Prize, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Berlin Prize, the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle, the Athens Prize for Literature.