The Tsar of Love and Techno cover art

The Tsar of Love and Techno

Preview

Get 30 days of Standard free

$8.99/mo after trial ends. Cancel anytime
Try for $0.00
More purchase options

The Tsar of Love and Techno

By: Anthony Marra
Narrated by: Beata Pozniak, Mark Bramhall, Rustam Kasymov
Try for $0.00

Auto-renews at $8.99/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.

Buy Now for $15.71

Buy Now for $15.71

Random House presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra, read by Mark Bramhall, Beata Pozniak and Rustam Kasymov.

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 PeaceNew York Times Book Review

‘An absolute masterpiece’ Sarah Jessica Parker, Entertainment Weekly

Anthologies Anthologies & Short Stories Fiction Short Stories Russia Royalty
adbl_web_anon_alc_button_suppression_t1

Critic Reviews

Shares much with David Mitchell's expansive Cloud Atlas, and it wears its blend of dry humour and tragedy very well... impressive (Observer)
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
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)
Gripping... painful and powerful, with welcome flashes of ironic humour, too (John Sunyer)
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)
A work of extraordinary confidence and empathy... a distinctive and heady fictional cocktail... thoroughly entertaining (Liam Hess)
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)
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
Addictive (Michelle Dean)
A superbly artful collection
All stars
Most relevant
Sometimes I wanted more but maybe there was enough. Even now I am finished, I feel like I need time to remember it all

Intriguing

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

so beautifully intertwined and the narrators were so easy on the ears one for every walk of life

wow what a beautiful book

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.

In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.