A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is simply spectacular. Not since Everything is Illuminated have I read a first novel so ambitious and fully realized. If this is where Anthony Marra begins his career, I can't imagine how far he will go

Storytelling of magical purity, illuminated by hope... Marra is a magnificent writer

An extraordinary first novel... A 21st-century War and Peace

Both heart-wrenching and uplifting, a stunning, intricately plotted, brilliantly written, tour-de-force of a novel that burns into the memory

A powerful tale... rivals anything Michael Ondaatje has written in its emotional force

50 Best Spring Reads

A book of violence and beauty, and the undisputed arrival of a major new talent

Remarkable and breathtaking, Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a spellbinding elegy for an overlooked land engulfed by an oft forgotten war. Set in the all-too-real Chechen conflict, Marra conjures fragile and heartfelt characters whose fates interrogate the very underpinnings of love and sacrifice

Powerful, convincing, beautifully realized -- it's hard to believe that A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a first novel. Anthony Marra is a writer to watch and savor

Anthony Marra’s novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, is both devastating and transcendent. The story of eight people (and a nation) navigating two brutal wars, it’s a novel of loyalty and sacrifice and enduring love. You’ll finish it transformed

Anthony Marra’s fine debut novel reaches tenderly, unflinchingly, into the center of the Chechnyan conflict of the late 1990s. This tale has its roots in shocking brutality, and its beauty in the human redemption that can come from unaccountable human kindness. Whimsies of circumstance, fate, and the ties of family and faith serve to guide the reader and the characters through a richly layered and deeply beautiful journey

It’s hard to think of an American writer who has so convincingly transported readers into the lives of characters as geopolitically distant as the cast of Chechens whose stories Anthony Marra braids together in A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. Mr. Marra gives us no anchorage in a familiar point-of-view. Instead, he gives us the natives of a peripheral Chechen village, and makes us imagine the world that is their village so convincingly that we forget how remote it is. The novel is a wondrous machine of many moving parts, all whirring together like clockwork, gracefully guiding us backward and forward in time, events unfolding in an order that feels inevitable. His ambitions are Tolstoyan, and he brings stylistic virtuosity to the prose, giving us lyric passages saturated with intelligence and psychological insight. By the end of the novel, we love the characters and grieve with them, and rejoice with the "immense, spinning joy" that is the novel's final note.

A truly impressive debut novel – undeniably grim, but ultimately uplifting – that hints at a stellar future

Anthony Marra’s impressive debut novel…much like Tolstoy’s Chechen novel, Hadji Murad, exudes an air of quiet resignation

An absolute masterpiece... I can't wait to see what's next for this extraordinarily talented young author

resembles the Joseph Heller of Catch-22 and the Jonathan Safran Foer of Everything Is Illuminated

Wonderfully lyrical… Ambitious and moving

extraordinary first novel... a 21st-century War and Peace

Both heart wrenching and uplifting, a stunning, intricately plotted, brilliantly written, tour-de-force of a novel that burns into the memory

Mr Marra is trying to capture some essence of the lives of men and women caught in the pincers of a brutal, decade-long war, and at this he succeeds beautifully... its ending is almost certain to leave you choked up and, briefly at least, transformed by tenderness.

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is one of the most accomplished and affecting books I've read in a very long time.

At the start of Marra's ambitious first novel, set in Chechnya during the Second Chechen War, eight year-old Havaa escapes the Russian soldiers that are carting off her father and flees a home set alight. Marra then plunges into a complex, beautifully crafted series of events, full of secrets and elegant moments, all wreathed in a frozen world.

Some novels defy gravity, spanning years and crossing ruined landscapes and entire solar systems of characters while still maintaining an ethereal, almost impossible lightness. Anthony Marra’s debut novel is one of them, and it does indeed call to mind an astronomical marvel. Taking place in war-ravaged Chechnya across a decade, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is a stunning debut, following a timid but determined country doctor and the girl he rescues once her father is arrested and presumably killed. Marra elegantly slides across time and perspective, mastering an omniscient voice that reveals each character’s future, present, and past, all in acrobatic sentences that leap through time.

A flash in the heavens that makes you look up and believe in miracles… Here, in fresh, graceful prose, is a profound story that dares to be as tender as it is ghastly… I haven’t been so overwhelmed by a novel in years. At the risk of raising your expectations too high, I have to say you simply must read this book

Marra is a brisk and able story-teller, and he moves deftly between a number of characters who are drawn into contact by the war… The writing is vivid throughout

Original, insightful