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