The exceptionally well-written collection of short stories by Anthony Marra sketches a plethora of unforgettable characters whose lives intersect with each other in a heartbreaking manner.

In the 1930s in Leningrad, a painter-retoucher edits controversial photographs for Stalin's Party, erasing and altering faces with his airbrush. Enchanted by the image of a ballerina, he finds himself accused of having ties with Polish espionage. A group of women narrates their stories as well as those of their grandmothers, former Gulag prisoners who settled in a mining town in Siberia. Two pairs of siblings share a wild, protective love. Young men across the former Soviet Union face violence at home and in the camp. Great sacrifices are made in the name of an oil-rich landscape, which is ordinary except for the almost incomprehensible peaceful past it depicts.

"The Tsar of Love and Techno," with stunning prose, speaks about the futility of efforts to erase people and events, human adaptability, the absurdity of life and war, and how small our lives are in relation to the vastness of the universe.