Excerpt from The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I left a trail of footprints in the plush white carpet as I approached the painting. It wasn't much to look at, which is about all you can do with a painting. An empty pasture cresting into a hill. A small house. An herb garden. A waist-high wall of white stone meandering at a diagonal. But in a patch of plugged-in canvas the size of a halved playing card, two slender shadows ran up the hill. One was a head and a half taller than the other. A slender bar of green grass separated their dark hands, and I couldn't tell if they were reaching for each other or letting go.

"Kolya died here? On this hill?" I asked.

"That's what the army adjutant said."

I turned back to the painting, to the two stick figures running up the hill, limbs unfurled. "Who are they?"

"I'm really not sure. I should've asked the prior owner when he called last year, asking for it back for a retrospective on Zakharov. Up in your stretch of the forest, actually. The Teplov Gallery, in Petersburg? I told them precisely where they could stick their request, and it wasn't in their mailbox, mind you. The nerve. Sell you a painting one day, then ask you to donate it back the next. No more than vipers in ascots, these academics."

A placard hung to the side of the painting. The final lines read Pay them no mind, for they are merely the failures of a novice restoration artist. They are no more than his shadows. They are not there.

My palms had dampened when I returned to the table. "You remember the mixtape we made for Kolya, before he went to Chechnya the first time?" I don't know what prompted me to ask, but I've often thought about that tape.

She gave the widest smile. It was the first genuine sentiment she'd expressed that morning. "Devil, I'd forgotten. Then again, I try to forget about everything from Kirovsk. I was a mess back then, wasn't I?"

She wanted me to say no, so I said, "Yes."

"Let's hope there're no extant copies. If that made it online, I'm not sure I'd ever live it down. Probably as damaging as a sex tape, that."

Nothing demystifies the glamour of celebrity like hearing one talk. I plopped an eighth confection onto my saucer. "He told me that he'd put off listening to the mixtape as long as possible. That he'd wait until he really needed it, like the last sip of water in his canteen. Do you think he ever heard it before, you know?"

I wanted her to say yes, so she said, "No."

"Yeah, you're probably right." Confections nine and ten landed on the saucer in tiny detonations of powdered sugar. I swear I just didn't want them to go to waste.

"Oh, one other thing," she said, crossing the living room to an antique desk constructed of a jillion drawers too small to hold anything larger than paper clips and stamps. She returned with a folded Polaroid I'd given to Kolya before he left for his first tour. I couldn't risk unfolding it in front of her. "The army adjutant in Grozny gave me that."

"Why'd you wait so long to tell me all this?"

She gazed at her dim reflection in the teacup, and then quickly broke it with the turn of the spoon. "I didn't invite you here to talk about your brother. You see . . . my husband is divorcing me. Some people think I've been a bit too frank in my public comments on the state of modern Russia in recent interviews. You begin criticizing the casting choice of a certain director, and you end up comparing Putin, unfavorably, to Lord Voldemort. Who knows how these things happen?"

"What's this have to do with me?"

"The painting, you idiot. The Zakharov. Oleg's hired suit-jacketed leeches for lawyers. They'd claim my toes if they weren't attached to my feet."

I still didn't understand.

She stared dismally. "I'm giving you the painting. Better you have it than the lawyers."

Excerpted from The Tsar of Love and Techno by Anthony Marra. Copyright © 2015 by Anthony Marra. Excerpted by permission of Hogarth Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.