I loved Chloe Aridjis's Book of Clouds so it was exciting to read her new novel, Asunder, which, in a story about art, guardianship, damage and philosophy, revealed again the deftness and depth of narrative understanding of this subtle and courageous writer.

Exhilarating… The novel wonderfully disobeys all conventional rules of realism and plotting, of show-don't-tell. Powerful and artful, Asunder works like a poem, pulling us into a labyrinthine sequence of connected images. By the end, it seems like an abstract painting, apparently defying narrative time. This all makes for rapturous and enraptured reading.

Strange, extravagant, darkly absorbing… This is a book about quietness and violence. There is a Nabokovian rhythm in Asunder's obsessive permutations, and in the novel's dance of fluttering life and slow decay. Her novel thrills with energy because of it.

Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange. To describe her novels as inconsequential is not to deny them substance, but to highlight their shadowy randomness, their pearlescent impressionism and the way in which they work by hints and cross-references... this is deft and shimmering fiction.

Aridjis has risen to the occasion with Asunder. Given that Asunder lacks a conventional plot, the fact that it is such an absorbing and moving book says much about Aridjis's skill as a writer. Her unusual imagery and lyrical style breathe life into this otherwise sombre story.

[A] stunningly good second novel... Aridjis's intelligent prose makes this slight story into something dramatic and affecting, completely coherent and oddly irresistible. It is a brilliant book.

Aridjis's writing is refreshingly escapist... Moreover, the novel itself has escaped from the strait-jacket of convential narrative and plot. This leaves Asunder free to devote itself to mood and atmosphere, in which it is highly successful. Reading Asunder offers an unusually absorbing experience. It is also an unusually enjoyable one.

Asunder exists with an intensity stronger than that of most novels. Reading it is absorbing and enlarging to the imagination

Set amidst the stillness of museums and the magic of indeterminate urban spaces, this is a subtly lyrical novel about the lasting seductions of art, the ubiquitous processes of decay -- and the surprising renewals that can come from these. Chloe Aridjis writes about sensations at the edges of perception, capturing experiences rarely included in fiction. A surprising sensibility and an effortlessly original voice

Marie, the narrator of this charming novel, has the ideal job for someone who likes a quiet life. She’s a guard at the National Gallery in London... but she’s starting to long for change. In a story this elegant, it had to be Paris where her shell will be cracked.

[A] fine, ghostly novel. Aridjis has admirably tight control over her themes throughout – fittingly, for a book about visual arts, its mise en scene feels meticulous – and this control permits the book to be discursive without ever feeling meandering. [A] wise and haunting book.

Lyrical and intense…lucid and captivating writing. Asunder is full of beautifully painted intricate detail yet also forms the canvas for an exploration of powerful wider themes

Eschewing a conventional narrative, this absorbing, episodic novel deceptively contains a crackling energy within its understated, artful prose

A dark tale, nicely turned

Chloe Aridjis’s anticipated follow-up to her debut, Book of Clouds, haunts and beguiles as much as its predecessor

Aridjis tells an improbable tale with enough details to give it authenticity, and to make her genuinely creepy story something thoughtful and original

This is an incredibly atmospheric novel, seen through the eyes of Marie, a consummate outsider

Aridjis is a fantastic new voice in fiction with a real gift for character and location

Set against London’s rain-soaked streets, it is an astute portrait of the alienation of urban life

A beautiful tale examining the processes of life

Eschewing a conventional narrative, this absorbing novel deceptively contains a crackling energy within its understated, artful prose

Wow! What a book! I'm eager for everyone I know to read it. It's an example of the very best in contemporary fiction…a contemporary masterpiece, and it wants you all to read it

A dazzlingly exciting novel... This is a deeply intelligent and engaging novel that uses all the virtues of old-fashioned storytelling to celebrate the triumphs and absurdities of new-fangled art

The Flamethrowers has gained praise from Jonathan Franzen and drawn comparisons with Patti Smith's Just Kids as it epically leaps between the New York art scene of the late 1970s and Italy in the midst of revolution... An essential summer read

Exhilirating, psychologically complex, and perfectly intense, this is a thrilling contemporary novel likely to become a cultural touchstone

A brilliant lightning bolt of a novel

In this extremely bold, swashbuckling novel, romantic and disillusioned at once, intellectually daring and even subversive, Rachel Kushner has created the most beguiling American ingénue abroad, well, maybe ever: Daisy Miller as a sharply observant yet vulnerable Reno-raised motorcycle racer and aspiring artist, set loose in gritty 70s New York and the Italy of the Red Brigades

Riveting

Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers is remarkable for its expansiveness and for its exhilarating succession of ideas

National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner brings NYC's art scene to life so well in The Flamethrowers you could get high off the paint

Fast-paced, sexy and smart

Electric...addictive...smart and satisfying

Captivating and compelling

This is a work of ferocious energy and imaginative verve, straining at the seams with ideas, riffs, jokes, set-pieces, belly-laughs, horror and heartbreak

Kushner writes with authority, passion and humour, her characters richly drawn and her story packed with delicious anecdotes and side lines from a wide array of memorable characters

Sexy and brilliant

Incandescent

Kushner's second novel comes loaded with recommendations and it's easy to see why…highly unusual and written with great seriousness and potency

It manages to relate the art scene in 1970s New York to the Red Brigades in Italy, with lots of motorbikes thrown in

Kushner’s writing is a kind of marvel

This novel has undeniable force and power… it’s beautifully written

You can feel the wind whipping through your hair, your pulse racing, as Kushner’s daring heroine, Reno, motorcycles across salt flats and down city streets, on the prowl for art, for love, for a cause

Kushner’s take on 1970s radicalism, art and politics is a big, absorbing read

A self-consciously cool mash-up of motorbikes, art and unpleasant Italian politics

In fiction I enjoyed Rachel Kushner's The Flamethrowers for its style and its daring

The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner manages to connect the art scene in New York in the 1970s with the Red Brigades in Italy, through the medium of motorcycles and drag car racing. Ambitious and beautifully written, it is one of the more surprising books I have read this year

Introducing a fresh new voice

A left-field and potentially ludicrous literary concept – a multigenerational transcontinental historical epic built around a speed-freak biker heroine – is executed with élan by American novelist Rachel Kushner … Genius

The novel, Kushner’s second, deploys mordant observations and chiseled sentences to explore how individuals are swept along by implacable social forces

A Bildungsroman set against the violence of the 20th century, The Flamethrowers is less a litmus test for misogyny than a standard for the recent historical novel

It should've won the National Book Award... It is second to none

Some of the prose is as thrilling as riding a motorbike on a mountain road with no lights

Has the kind of poise, wariness and moral graininess that puts you in mind of weary-souled visionaries like Robert Stone or Joan Didion

For a while last spring it seemed like every single person I knew in New York was reading The Flamethrowers, which is normally enough to put me off a book, but in this case I did read it and found that its ubiquity was more than justified. Then in September I happened to visit the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, where one of its most memorable set-pieces takes place, and I wanted to read it all over again. If I say it captures a young woman's experience of the downtown art world in the 1970s, I'm going to make it sound boring, but in fact it's superbly enjoyable

Much of what makes this book so magnificent is Kushner's astonishing observational powers; she seems to work with a muse and a nail gun, so surprisingly yet forcefully do her sentences pin reality to the page. I was pinned there too –– BEST BOOK OF 2013

A terrific, gripping, poetic book... Kushner's meandering plot and pacy pose has completely won me over

Kushner’s prose dazzles with invention