Funny, charming and heart-warming, this debut is a gem of a novel about a rather awkward university professor's search for love. I loved this unconventional romance

Full of quirky humour and touching tenderness. Imagine the love child of Eleanor Oliphant and Bridget Jones and you have this book

Such a joy to read - I honestly can't think of many books that I enjoyed more. It's the definition of a comfort book - an easy and warm read with a lot of heart, and it made me laugh out loud more than any book before

Brisk, funny, and at times outrageous . . . A completely charming story that is as engaging as it is funny

Charming and hilarious

A unique and heartwarming exploration of love and neurodiversity.

Funny, endearing, and pure, wonderful escapism

A sweet, funny rom-com . . . You'll be willing Don and Rosie on every step of the way

Original, charming and very funny

Touching and laugh-out-loud funny -- think The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time meets Silver Linings Playbook

A hilarious, unlikely romance with heartbreaking twists

Don Tillman is one of the most endearing, charming and fascinating literary characters I have met in a long time

Genuinely funny; you'll laugh out loud

I absolutely loved The Rosie Project -- original and clever, and perfectly written.The world is going to fall in love with Don and Rosie

A poignant, funny novel about how you don't find love; it finds you

Don Tillman will exasperate, delight and immerse you in a world so original, in a story so compelling, I defy you not to read through the night. Glorious

Beneath the fun and the fluff there is a quietly profound exploration of the assumptions around autism and what it means to have an atypical - or typical - brain

A very funny and touching love story

Adorable . . . Really funny and heart-warming, a gem of a book

If you like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time you'll love The Rosie Project

Written in a superbly pitch-perfect voice, The Rosie Project had me cheering for Don on every page. I'm madly in love with this book! Trust me, you will be, too

The best, most honestly told love story I've read in a long time

Marvellous. Don Tillman is as awkward and confusing a narrator as he is lovable and charming

Prime deck-chair material

As well as being delightfully romantic, this is a very funny book and you'll be laughing out loud at Don's misadventures

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