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

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