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."
