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The Tsar of Love and Techno

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What to expect

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 Techno begins 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

Critics Review

Shares much with David Mitchell's expansive Cloud Atlas, and it wears its blend of dry humour and tragedy very well... impressive
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
Irish Times
Gripping... painful and powerful, with welcome flashes of ironic humour, too
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
Times Literary Supplement
A work of extraordinary confidence and empathy... a distinctive and heady fictional cocktail... thoroughly entertaining
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’
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
Guardian
A superbly artful collection
BBC Culture
Author Anthony Marra
Narrator Beata Pozniak, Mark Bramhall, Rustam Kasymov
Duration 10 hours and 46 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781473549050
Format Audiobook
Publisher Random House
Genre Short stories
Availability AU, GB, IE

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