This new English translation by Michael Hofmann - the first in more than 75 years - expertly captures the fecundity, originality and musicality of Döblin's masterpiece ... A bold and dazzling collage of a novel

Ace translator Michael Hofmann has delivered an exhilarating new version of Alfred Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz: that street-smart, slang-filled, richly allusive tale of crime, punishment and social crisis in the capital of Weimar Germany just before Hitler's rise to power. Hofmann's firecracker prose fizzes through this revolutionary trip into the lower depths of big-city life

The classic Weimar novel ... Long branded untranslatable, a fluent, pacy new translation by Michael Hofmann gainsays that assumption, opening up the book for English-speakers

Reading it was the most wonderful experience

Franz Biberkopf is one of the modern world's richest literary characters, as memorable as Woyzeck, Oblomov or Madame Bovary

Berlin Alexanderplatz is Europe's Moby-Dick ... both seriously significant and a great deal of fun

A flashing kaleidoscope of a novel ... Michael Hofmann's translation has a vivid immediacy

Brutal and prophetic ... a turning point in the history of the German novel

Berlin Alexanderplatz, which celebrates its 90th anniversary this year, still fascinates as a cautionary tale by shining light on the most obscure parts of the human soul.

It's her best book yet, another big step forward.

Gritty, empathetic, finely rendered, no sugary toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled.

This unflinching and immersive portrait of prison life is a worthy follow-up to The Flamethrowers… Kushner’s prose fizzes as dangerously as the electric fence around Stanville, her observations spiky as barbed wire, her humour desert-sky dark… [The Mars Room] marks you like a tattoo.

A jail novel every bit as brutal as those of Edward Bunker or Stephen King… The prose is beautifully composed and the narrative never goes where you expect it. Kushner thinks herself startlingly well into the minds of warped men. The ending is stunning.

A portrait of contemporary America from one of the literary world's most exciting emerging writers.

Manages to be a novel with its own worldview and its own textures, as much as a chronicle of a system that holds more prisoners per head of population than any other country in the world.

Ambitious, astute, serious and profound, The Mars Room catapults Kushner into the American major league, along with Jonathan Franzen, Annie Proulx and Joyce Carol Oates.

Both more blackly comic and more knowing about prison life [than “Orange Is The New Black”]… It’s one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart… so powerful.

Kushner is a young master. I honestly don’t know how she is able to know so much and convey all of this in such a completely entertaining and mesmerizing way.

Kushner is going to be one we turn to for our serious pleasures and for the insight and wisdom we’ll be needing in hard times to come. She is a novelist of the very first order.

Rachel Kushner’s third, extraordinarily accomplished novel, The Mars Room, glows with… authentic hyper-detail… She succeeds beautifully.

You sense early in this novel that you’re entering Mary Gaitskill, Denis Johnson and Charles Bukowski territory… Kushner offers a great, subversive portrait of… life inside the women’s prison… grainy and persuasive.

Urgent, terrifying and fascinating... Told with unswerving precision... Kushner is one of our most outstanding modern writers.

[Kushner] uses the novel as a place to be flamboyant and funny, and to tell propulsive stories, but mainly as a capacious arena for thinking... Like [Don DeLillo], she is good at conjuring mayhem.

The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner's masterly new novel, infiltrates a California prison and the American criminal-justice system with breathtaking intimacy and propulsion.

The Mars Room is so sensually convincing it leaves its imprint of steel mesh on your forehead, while its compassion embraces baby-killer and brutal cop alike in the merciless confines of the American justice system. An extraordinary literary achievement.

The Mars Room is uniquely informed ... empathetic. An addictive novel, laced throughout with bracing intelligence.

I had to brace myself as I did for Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life ... An unforgettable portrait of a life lived on the margins in contemporary America.

The Mars Room offers a rare combination of admirably sure-footed sentences and a character and plot that made me stay up far too late. Romy’s situation is unbearable, and almost unbearably realised, but the writing is so very good and the ideas so expertly handled that it’s a great pleasure to read in all its devastation.

Written with the absorbing specificity and scope that have established Kushner as one of the most celebrated contemporary novelists in the country... A novel of great urgency and devastation.

The Mars Room is mysterious and irreducible. The writing is beautiful -- from hard precision to lyrical imagery, with a flawless feel for when to soar and when to pull back.

In smart, determined, and vigilant Romy, Kushner, an acclaimed writer of exhilarating skills, has created a seductive narrator of tigerish intensity… This is a gorgeously eviscerating novel of incarceration writ large… Rooted in deeply inquisitive thinking and executed with artistry and edgy wit, Kushner’s dramatic and disquieting novel investigates with verve and compassion societal strictures and how very difficult it is to understand each other and to be truly free.

Heartbreaking and unforgettable… [The Mars Room] deserves to be read with the same level of pathos, love, and humanity with which it clearly was written.

Any book by literary darling Rachel Kushner will be highly anticipated, and The Mars Room is no exception... a bleak, affecting read.

A searing look at life on the margins… This is, fundamentally, a novel about poverty and how our structures of power do not work for the poor, and Kushner does not flinch… gripping.

Stunning… The Mars Room follows a woman, separated from her young son, who is serving two consecutive life sentences in a women’s correctional facility in California. A gorgeously written depiction of survival and the absurd and violent facets of life in prison.

Utterly convincing… the fictions [Kushner] creates have the certainty of fact.

Kushner is a masterful world-creator, and her accomplishment here is unparalleled.

Kushner’s great gift is for the evocation of a scene, a time and place, and the atmosphere.

The Mars Room is the darkly comic, tragically poignant tale of a stripper turned convict and the life that awaits her behind bars.

Kushner creates immersive histories of frayed lives from the criminal demi-monde.

While Rachel Kushner's latest book doesn't pull any punches, her prose is so witty and surreal that I couldn't help tearing through... I loved it.

Spiked with gallows humour from Romy's cell mates, [The Mars Room] is a seamy snapshot of life behind bars, served with a full-throated gusto.

Placing culturally marginalised voices centre stage to explode open a world many of us know little about... [The Mars Room] left me in tears.

Crushing... A powerful, tragic novel.

[A] visceral portrait of prison life

The charm and wit of the incarcerated people in The Mars Room shines in Kushner's prose

A mysterious portrait of contemporary America and life on its margins... for fans of "Orange Is The New Black".

A very compelling read… hilarious and depressing and rage-inducing in equal measures.

Absorbing.

Lyrical, bleakly comic and, ultimately, intensely affecting

It is a necessary and compelling book, and this year’s must read

Rachel Kushner’s exhaustive research into what goes on within these walls

Kushner’s high-definition, high-impact prose is as electrifying as it is daring

The momentum of the novel resides in its prose, the spring and sass of a voice so vivid it can largely dispense with the mechanics of plot

A salty and hilarious novel from one of America's best living novelists.

Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room should be a favourite [to win the Man Booker Prize]. If you like your escapism as gritty as it gets, prepare to be hooked by this unflinching account of a female prisoner serving a double life sentence... The Mars Room is rarely easy reading, but the furore of voices and violence and injustice throws you right into the story and keeps you immersed there.

Kushner’s novel is a timely reminder that a country’s authoritarian tendencies can be most easily measured by the number of people it deems unworthy of freedom

Rachel Kushner knows how to sniff out a good character.

Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room immerses you in the life of a high-security women’s prison in California, its central character Romy – accused of killing her stalker – both gritty and fragile. This was not a subject I thought would grip me, but in Kushner’s firm hands I was entranced. Much of the book is autobiographical – while never in prison herself, Kushner was the daughter of Beatniks and allowed to roam the dodgier areas of San Francisco as a teenager. The characters range from bullet-headed killers to a well-meaning male teacher whose ambiguities are brilliantly done. Romy’s trans friend Conan, “shoulders as broad as the aisle, and a jawline beard”, is delightfully free of the politically correct, while the style veers excitingly from straight narrative to scribbled lists like whimpers of despair.

Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room was a hot favourite on this year's Booker shortlist, and it's easy to see why… Kushner's atmospheric writing is compelling to the last.

Kushner’s writing is the most marvellous I read this year… time and again I found myself rereading paragraphs of The Mars Room for her perfectly turned sentences, the music of her prose