Shares much with David Mitchell's expansive Cloud Atlas, and it wears its blend of dry humour and tragedy very well... impressive

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

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

Gripping... painful and powerful, with welcome flashes of ironic humour, too

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