The Flamethrowers - Hardcover

Kushner, Rachel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846557917 ISBN 13: 9781846557910

Publisher: Harvill Secker, 2013

Synopsis

This is the New York Times Top 10 Books of the Year. It is the Guardian Best Books of the Year. It is shortlisted for the National Book Awards. The year is 1977 and Reno - so called because of the place of her birth - has come to New York intent on turning her fascination with motorcycles and speed into art. Her arrival coincides with an explosion of activity in the art world - artists have colonised a deserted and industrial SoHo, are squatting in the East Village, and are blurring the line between life and art. Reno meets a group of dreamers and raconteurs who submit her to a sentimental education of sorts. She begins an affair with an artist named Sandro Valera, the semi-estranged heir of an Italian tyre and motorcycle empire. When they visit Sandro's family home in Italy, Reno falls in with members of the radical movement that overtook Italy in 1977. Betrayal sends her reeling into a clandestine undertow. The Flamethrowers is a fearless novel, an intensely engaging exploration of the mystique of the feminine, the fake the terrorist. In the centre of it all is Kushner's brilliantly realised protagonist, a young woman on the verge.

About this title

Review:

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

"Kushner is rapidly emerging as a thrilling and prodigious novelist" (Jonathan Franzen)

"One of the most thrilling and high-octane literary experiences I have had in ages" (Colum McCann 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)

"An adrenalin-fuelled coming-of-age novel" (Sunday Telegraph)

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

"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)

"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)

Book Description:

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

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvill Secker
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1846557917
• ISBN 13: 9781846557910
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 400