*** Granta Best of Young American Novelists 2017 *** 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