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  • Published: 14 August 2017
  • ISBN: 9781784707255
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $29.99

The Tsar of Love and Techno




The new book from one of the most prize-winning young writers in the US – nine dazzling interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war and the redemptive power of art

A Granta Best Young American Novelist

1930s Leningrad: a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting. The mystery behind this painting threads together each of the stories that follow, where we meet 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.

  • Published: 14 August 2017
  • ISBN: 9781784707255
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 336
  • RRP: $29.99

About the author

Anthony Marra

Anthony Marra's first novel was A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), which won an array of prizes including the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Barnes and Noble Fiction Discover Award, the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle and the Athens Prize for Literature, and appeared on more than twenty Books of the Year lists. This was followed by The Tsar of Love and Techno. A Granta Best of Young American Novelists 2017, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop,a Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting Award recipient, Marra lives in Oakland, California, and teaches at Stanford University. Visit http://anthonymarra.net/.

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Praise for The Tsar of Love and Techno

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