As irresistible as the impulse which leads her characters to surface to maturity, raising their heads above the floods of silver ignorance

'Ravishingly beautiflu stories...Divakaruni not only conveys emotions with stunning accuracy, she also transforms the outer world into reflections of the soul'

'These exquisite stories entice us with the author's gift of storytelling and her characters' originality, independence and insight'

'Young and old, male and female, east and west, modern and traditional, all elements blend in this exquisite collection...sensitive, elegant and beautifully descriptive'

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

A work of extraordinary confidence and empathy... a distinctive and heady fictional cocktail... thoroughly entertaining

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’

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

Addictive

A superbly artful collection

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

Audacious... brilliant... ambitious and fearless

Each story is a gem… almost unbearably moving

Seamlessly narrated, with flashes of dark humour

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