Shares much with David Mitchell's expansive <i>Cloud Atlas</i>, 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
A Granta Best Young American Novelist
1930s Leningrad: a failed portrait artist employed by Soviet censors must erase political dissenters from official images and artworks. One day, he receives an antique painting. The mystery behind this painting threads together each of the stories that follow, where we meet 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.