The Flame Alphabet

The Flame Alphabet drags the contemporary novel kicking, screaming, and foaming at the mouth back towards the track it should be following -- Tom McCarthy
A genuinely new thing in an age of recycling. Is the novel history? Not while people like this are still taking risks on it -- Tim Martin, Books of the Year * Daily Telegraph *
One of the most powerful works of fiction I have ever read... a revelation and a castigation -- Stuart Kelly * Scotsman *
One of our most audacious and inventive writers catches fire in this thrillingly subversive book * Vanity Fair *
What I found fascinating about this book, after its remarkable premise, and the cold beauty of its prose, was my own reaction to it. I can put it no better than to say that this book got to me... A masterpiece -- Nick Lezard * Guardian *
Marcus has created a disorientating masterpiece. You'll never look at words in quite the same way again * Financial Times *
Marcus is the rarest kind of writer: a necessary one. It's become impossible to imagine the literary world without his daring, mind-bending and heartbreaking writing -- Jonathan Safran Foer
Echoes of Ballard's insanely sane narrators, echoes of Kafka's terrible gift for metaphor, echoes of David Lynch, William Burroughs, Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz and Mary Shelley: a world of echoes out of which the sanely insane genius of Marcus somehow manages to wrest something new and unheard of. Feverishly turning the pages, I felt myself, increasingly, in the presence of a classic -- Michael Chabon
The most unsettling novel of the year... It looks from a distance like a sci-fi dystopia but is, in fact, far more interesting than that -- Nicholas Lezard, Books of the Year * Guardian *
A story with the potential to wound, to shock, and to horrify -- Adam Langer * Boston Globe *
I want the English language to do things it hasn't done before, and I want American fiction to do things it hasn't done before, and I want to be in a state of arrest at the moment of gazing upon a page of text, and Marcus is one of those very few writers who can do that -- Rick Moody
Formally inventive, dark and dryly comic ... The Flame Alphabet has the feel of an event * New York Times Book Review *
Larded with creepy metaphors, the author's own wayward language destabilises the reader's sense of linguistic propriety * Independent *
Ben Marcus is one of the rare inventors in our literary language.... His [stories] can enchant and wreck your mind -- Jonathan Lethem
An authentic meditation on the sacred cruelty of communication that will leave his readers speechless * San Francisco Chronicle *
I assure you that Marcus' chilling vision will haunt you long after his novel ends * Haaretz *
Strange and moving and endlessly fascinating, this novel is yet another of Marcus's wicked triumphs * Flavorwire *
To people who just want to read a good yarn and who think Ben Marcus is too weird for them, I'd say: Think again . . . The novel can operate on multiple registers: as metaphor, sociology, conventional thriller, and, at bottom, discourse on parenthood and family that is freakishly sad and incredibly good * Bookforum *
What Marcus has done, very successfully, is create a mechanical world that has the quality of a nightmare or inescapable hallucination: it is as if he has superimposed another layer of reality upon our own -- Philip Womack * New Humanist *
An engrossing story that is both an intelligent exploration of what is left of life when verbal communication breaks down, and a thrilling story about survival at all costs * Evening Chronicle *
A sci-fi disaster-movie plot with a determinedly cerebral twist. Marcus offers a vividly realised dystopia, and it's an impressive feat of imagination (and, of course, language)... jump in if you want your brain stimulated -- Cathy Dillon * Irish Times *
The Flame Alphabet's magic is its unsettling otherness, its weird beauty, the energising effects of its associative power -- David Annand * Literary Review *
It's wickedly funny, but also a brilliant, eccentric horror story -- Kate Saunders * The Times *
Brilliant and disorientating -- George Pendle * Financial Times *
Part-fairy tale, part-horror story, part-literary dissection of these: a mutant worthy of the best experimenters -- Jonathan Gibbs * Independent *
A thoughtfully written, clever tale -- Lesley McDowell * Sunday Herald *
Gets into your head and under your skin and stays there -- Josh Cohen, Books of the Year * Big Issue *
A terrifying modernist masterpiece * Guardian *