Excellent writing, compelling characters, and vividly horrific settings bring such power to this collection of nine interlocking stories spanning 75 years (1937-2013), from the great terror of Stalin’s Soviet Russia through post Soviet Putin Russia. The locations are as interesting as the characters and plot lines. 

Arctic Kirovsk, almost a main character, was originally a labor camp and later a city of nickel mines, polluted skies, a toxic lake, and a waste dump forest. Leningrad in 1937 is a city of cold, dull apartment blocks, NKVD raids, censorship, and propaganda. Chechnya is a land of war, resistance, and land mines–and post war Grozny, its capital city, tries to rebrand itself beyond bullets and bombs. 

In all of these places, a character narrates their story which weaves together a larger story connecting people and places over time, from a prima ballerina to a film star to a censor, a tour guide, an army conscript, an art restoration expert,  and more. Communist party leaders, coercion, and corruption always play a starring role. 

This is a book you want to read over the course of a few days rather than a few weeks because some of the connections among characters are subtle (for example, a child in one story is the father of an elderly father in a later story of a different time and place). The connections work well, but they are not obvious.

I read Marra’s first book, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, (a novel about war torn Chechnya) when it came out in 2013 and loved it. I don’t know why I waited until now to read this 2015 book, and now I need to get his 2022 novel, Mercury Pictures Presents.

This book of dark humor, irony, and Soviet suffering will be one of my top 5 reads this year.