- Published: 4 August 2016
- ISBN: 9781448138500
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 336
The Tsar of Love and Techno
- Published: 4 August 2016
- ISBN: 9781448138500
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 336
Marra’s Russia is marked by both interconnection and darkly comic irony... the book’s brilliance and humor are laced with the somber feeling that the country is allergic to evolution... A powerful and melancholy vision of a nation with long memories and relentless turmoil
Kirkus
Addictive
Michelle Dean, Guardian
Remarkable... Marra is a gifted writer with the energy and the ambition to explore the lives of characters whose experiences and whose psyches might seem, until we read his work, so distant from our own. Reading his work is like watching the restoration — the reappearance, on the page — of those whom history has erased
Washington Post
Each story is a gem… almost unbearably moving
New York Times
Seamlessly narrated, with flashes of dark humour
International New York Times
A superbly artful collection
BBC Culture
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
Audacious... brilliant... ambitious and fearless
New York Times Book Review
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
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
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
A work of extraordinary confidence and empathy... a distinctive and heady fictional cocktail... thoroughly entertaining
Liam Hess, Literary Review
Gripping... painful and powerful, with welcome flashes of ironic humour, too
John Sunyer, Financial Times
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
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