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