The Mars Room

By Rachel Kushner

Book Overview

TIME'S #1 FICTION TITLE OF THE YEAR - NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2018

FINALIST for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE and the NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD

LONGLISTED for the ANDREW CARNEGIE MEDAL

An instant New York Times bestseller from two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room earned tweets from Margaret Atwood--"gritty, empathic, finely rendered, no sugar toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled"--and from Stephen King--"The Mars Room is the real deal, jarring, horrible, compassionate, funny."

It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision.

Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner's work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined. As James Wood said in The New Yorker, her fiction "succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive."

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1476756554
• ISBN13: 9781476756554
• Release Date: May 2018
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.18 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.2" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Humanizing and Gorgeous

This book explores a woman’s time in prison. Equal time is spent talking about her life and how she ended up there, as well as the relationships developed on the inside. This story is gorgeous and humanizing. I will definitely be recommending this to others.