Scintillatingly alive... It ripples with stories, anecdotes, set-piece monologues, crafty egotistical tall tales, and hapless adventures - New Yorker

One of the most thrilling and high-octane literary experiences I have had in ages - Sunday Independent

It's so good, it's a little frightening… it makes any fretting over the state of the novel look plain silly - Guardian

Unfolds on a bigger, brighter screen than nearly any recent American novel I can remember - New York Times

Kushner is rapidly emerging as a thrilling and prodigious novelist

An ambitious and serious American novel. The sentences are sharp and gorgeously made. The scope is wide. The political and the personal are locked in a deep and fascinating embrace - Colm Tóibín

An adrenalin-fuelled coming-of-age novel - Sunday Telegraph

Dazzling... The Flamethrowers is a virtuoso performance; a ride of ache and pleasure, handled with pinpoint command - The Times

This glittering novel is both carefully structured and exhilarating - Daily Telegraph

Rachel Kushner’s fearless, blazing prose ignites the 70s New York art scene and Italian underground - Vanity Fair

A bright burning flame of a novel - Spectator

The Flamethrowers is a strange, fascinating beast of a novel, brimming with ideas, and sustained by the muscular propulsion of Kushner’s prose… Kushner emerges as a wildly gifted artist filling a sketchbook with thrilling, eye-catching scenes - Sunday Times

There is an exhilarating freedom to Kushner’s writing… Taut, vividly intelligent prose - Prospect

Sparky and inventive...a riot of a novel - Daily Mail

Ms Kushner’s kaleidoscopic prose carries the novel’s shifts in location and person, and the fast-paced rhythm harnesses the thrill of adventure - Economist

Swells with a daunting bravado - Irish Times

Oscillating between the hedonistic New York art world and Italy in the midst of the Years of Lead, The Flamethrowers is that rare thing, a novel that uses recent history not as a picturesque backdrop but as a way of interrogating the present. Kushner's urgent prose and psychological acuity make this one of the most compelling and enjoyable novels I've read this year - Hari Kunzru

The controlled intensity and perception in Rachel Kushner's novels mark her as one of the most brilliant writers of the new century. She's 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. Rachel Kushner is a novelist of the very first order. The Flamethrowers follows Telex from Cuba as a masterful work - Robert Stone

The Flamethrowers lives up to its incendiary title – it is a brilliant, startling truly revolutionary book about the New York art world of the seventies, Italian class warfare, and youth's blind acceleration into the unknown. Kushner is a genius prose stylist, and her Reno is one of the most fully realized protagonists I've ever encountered, moving fluidly from the fringe of the fringe movement to the center of the action. I want to recommend this stunning book to everyone I know - Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!

Rachel Kushner writes dazzling, sexy, glorious prose. She is as brilliant on men and motorcycles as she is on art and film. The Flamethrowers is an ambitious and powerful novel. - Dana Spiotta, author of Eat the Document and Stone Arabia

A high-wire performance worthy of Philippe Petit... Hang on: this is a trip you don’t want to miss - Washington Post

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 - Sunday Express

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 - Grazia

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

A brilliant lightning bolt of a novel - Maud Newton, NPR

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 - Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name

Riveting - Time

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

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 - Entertainment Weekly

Fast-paced, sexy and smart - Cosmopolitan

Electric...addictive...smart and satisfying - Oprah Magazine

Captivating and compelling - The Bookbag

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 - Booktrust

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 - We Love This Book

Sexy and brilliant - Sunday Times Style

Incandescent - Image

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

Kushner’s writing is a kind of marvel - Irish Examiner

An extraordinarily ambitious big American novel about a young artist and the worlds she encounters in New York and Rome in the mid-1970s - by turns underground, elite, dangerous.

For fans of Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and Jeffrey Eugenides' The Marriage Plot

The big American novel of 2013

Scott Rudin has bought the film rights to this novel

From the bestselling American author of Telex from Cuba, which was nominated for a National Book Award

'Kushner is rapidly emerging as a thrilling and prodigious novelist' - Jonathan Franzen

The book has received overwhelming rave reviews across the board in the US, including a 5 page rave in The New Yorker from James Wood

Shortlisted for the 2013 National Book Awards