The Tsar of Love and Techno

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 *

Anthony Marra is the author of the novels A Constellation of Vital Phenomena and The Tsar of Love and Techno.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena was his first novel and won 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. It was also named a Best Book of the Year by over twenty publications.

Marra was selected as a Granta Best of Young American Novelists in 2017. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Whiting Award.

He lives in Oakland, California, and teaches at Stanford University.

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