His complex character, indeed his whole life, was held together by two qualities - scholarship and political conviction - which made him a major influence on three decades of political thought

He was the foremost political thinker of his generation in Britain who in his most formidable books, Culture And Society, The Long Revolution and The Country and the City, redrew the map of our cultural history, and elsewhere made heroic interventions in the main political debates of his time

For those who read English in the '60s, it was common to revere Williams as both a rock of integrity and a pathfinder for new ways of seeing culture, communication, class and democracy

He shows us the language and imagery, the beliefs and developed ideas, the hidden assumptions and class biases, and the 'structures of feeling' of literally hundreds of writers, major and minor, poets and pamphleteers, geniuses and hacks. . . . His erudition is immense

[A] powerful collection . . . Sontag's brilliance as a literary critic, her keen analytical skill and her genius for the searingly apt phrase are all fiercely displayed here

Most people I know who have read anything by Curtis sittenfeld would read anything else the woman wrote, me included...Suddenly, trivial details become exquisite insights into class, entitlement, love and your place in the world...Fans will instantly be swept along by Sittenfeld's confident, page-turning writing and sharp eye.

A joy to read...[for] Sittenfeld's ability to get under the skin of complicated, contradictory characters, capturing the anxieties, challenges and compromises of everyday life, love and parenthood so that ... you will find yourself nodding at the day-to-day dynamics and thinking, "Yes, that's exactly how it is."

Dazzlingly original, this absorbing book, which is at heart about family ties, fizzes with energy and will grip you to the last page.

Will this be a novel turning on supernatural powers and a natural disaster or something else altogether? Without giving the end away one can say that it is more than anything a wonderful anatomy of family life.

Engrossing.

An intelligent, quietly devastating roller coaster of a read.

Sittenfeld’s confident no-frills style belies the complexities of her characters and their relationships.

The questions it raises about self-fulfilling prophecies remain compelling...a modern American fable about tempting fate.

Novelists get called master storytellers all the time, but Sittenfeld really is one.

Psychologically vivid...Sisterland is a testament to the author's growing depth and assurance as a writer.

A must-read: the best dissection of a life spent among small children I've ever read.

This assured and confident novel successfully combines the high-concept fantasy of Bewitched with the high-brow realism of Updike or Tyler

Fans will be swept along by Sittenfeld's confident, page-turning writing

Bohane is a post-apocalyptic, low-tech, dog-eat-dog Irish city - and it's mesmerising. The characters' coarse language is vividly poetic, and there's a peculiar optimism about their lives that comes of living in an atmosphere of heart-stopping brutishness. A unique and fascinating book

The slangy prose is this novel by the winner of the 2012 Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Award… is what makes this book such a success. A raw slab of life from a hellish future.

Barry’s vernacular, like his plot, is a wonderful blend of past, present and imagined future. His characters all have different voices, and his free indirect style changes as it moves across the city. That Barry has control over all these registers, and makes them hi9s own, is quite astonishing. This debut novel marks him out as a writer of great promise.

Kevin Barry’s race gangland thriller blends vivid characterisation with a Joycean exuberance of language.

This just might be the exceptional book which should be judged by its cover

An ingenious tale

Cleverly metafictional, humorously perverse, and impressively original

Funny, charming and heart-warming

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