Author:Anthony Marra,Mark Bramhall,Beata Pozniak,Rustam Kasymov
Random House presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra, read by Mark Bramhall, Beata Pozniak and Rustam Kasymov.
The Tsar of Love and Technobegins in 1930s Leningrad, where a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting of a dacha inside a box of images due to be altered. The mystery behind this painting threads together the stories that follow, which take us through a century and introduce 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
Shares much with David Mitchell's expansive Cloud Atlas, and it wears its blend of dry humour and tragedy very well... impressive
—— Observer , Ben EastThis 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 TimesMasterful ... 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 TimesGripping... painful and powerful, with welcome flashes of ironic humour, too
—— John Sunyer , Financial TimesMarra 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 SupplementA work of extraordinary confidence and empathy... a distinctive and heady fictional cocktail... thoroughly entertaining
—— Liam Hess , Literary ReviewMarra’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 , LadyA 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 YearAddictive
—— Michelle Dean , GuardianA superbly artful collection
—— BBC CultureRemarkable... 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 PostAudacious... brilliant... ambitious and fearless
—— New York Times Book ReviewEach story is a gem… almost unbearably moving
—— New York TimesSeamlessly narrated, with flashes of dark humour
—— International New York TimesMarra’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