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.

The new book from one of the most prize-winning young writers in the US - nine dazzling interwoven stories about family, sacrifice, the legacy of war and the redemptive power of art

About the Author
Anthony Marra's first novel was A Constellation of Vital Phenomena (2013), which won an array of prizes including the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, the Barnes and Noble Fiction Discover Award, the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle and the Athens Prize for Literature, and appeared on more than twenty Books of the Year lists. This was followed by The Tsar of Love and Techno. A Granta Best of Young American Novelists 2017, a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop,a Guggenheim Fellow and Whiting Award recipient, Marra lives in Oakland, California, and teaches at Stanford University. Visit http://anthonymarra.net/.

Reviews
Shares much with David Mitchell's expansive Cloud Atlas, 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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9781784707255
Author Anthony Marra
Format Paperback
Page Count 336
Imprint Vintage
Publisher Vintage Publishing
Weight(grams) 234g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 20mm