Wonderfully strange

This hypnotic debut novel - one of the hottest reads of the year - is no ordinary book. It combines pitch-perfect teen angst with a fantastical setting and premise; as much a hymn to reading as a gripping story.

A compelling page turning read

Deeply perplexing . . . as hints of the reality behind the fantasy start to emerge, the story develops its own peculiar and intense momentum.

A fantastic novel, and a really exciting and engaging new voice. The fact that the reader has to work hard to understand this world makes it all the more compelling, and it packs quite an emotional punch when we realise what's going on. I couldn't put it down, and loved the voice of Calamity, and her vulnerability and reliance on her world, while the reader could see it cracking wide open, was heartbreaking.

This is a clever, highly original and complex coming-of-age story. Lichtarowicz deserves praise for fearless inventiveness and the zest of her fast-paced writing

Like a mash-up of Margaret Atwood and Roald Dahl . . . once picked up it’s hard to put down

This is an utterly original, intriguing and intense book which thrills the reader with its story and language. This is the start of a stunning career. Paula L is to be congratulated hugely - I am sent about 20 books a week, so many of them simply copying what has gone before, or following very obvious trends, and it's so good to encounter real individuality and freshness and an identifiable, strong, creative voice.

Flighty, playful… Barnes succeeds in vividly recreating teenage precociousness, particularly what it feels like to be a young male encountering love and sex

A dazzling entertainer

He writes perceptively about the shift from self-absorbed teenager to adult.

Irony and imagery are deployed with a finesse even Flaubert wouldn't wince at...consumately elegant

A great read for all fantasy fans

A sequel that will be greeted eagerly by fans of The Spook's Apprentice.

Watch out for the new installment of Joe Delaney's Spook's series.

The second volume in an excellent series... the author eschews the usual predictable weirdo fantasy settings and places the characters in a kind of olden-days Lancashire.

The story has an intense, creepy feel from the very start, and is full of darkly atmospheric scenes, which are it's great strength

Delaney's tale of the Spook and his apprentice deftly combine elements of horror with the idea of the wandering, despised hero, as popularised in the western and it's imitators. The Wardstone Chronicles remain one of the strongest ongoing series of the moment.

Thrilling tale.

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