The Mars Room
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
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3.8 • 40 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A fearless and heartbreaking novel about love, friendship and incarceration, from the author of the internationally acclaimed The Flamethrowers.
‘Astounding… this year’s must-read’ ANNE ENRIGHT
Romy Hall is starting two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. Her crime? The killing of her stalker.
Inside awaits a world where women must hustle and fight for the bare essentials. Outside: the San Francisco of her youth. The Mars Room strip club where she was once a dancer. Her seven-year-old son, Jackson.
As Romy forms friendships over liquor brewed in socks and stories shared through sewage pipes her future seems to unfurl in one long, unwavering line – until news from beyond the prison bars forces Romy to try and outrun her destiny.
* Pre-order Rachel Kushner’s new novel, Creation Lake, now *
‘Breathtaking’ VOGUE
‘One of our most outstanding modern writers’ STYLIST
‘Gritty, empathetic, finely rendered’ MARGARET ATWOOD (on Twitter)
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The Mars Room hits like a hurricane: powerful, destructive, impossible to ignore. Rachel Kushner spent a lot of time behind bars to research her novel, talking to prisoners about their lives and using their stories as a basis for her sprawling cast of characters, who exist on society's extreme margins. Her protagonist is Romy Hall, a former stripper serving a life sentence for killing a man who stalked her; we slowly learn about Romy’s feral youth and the agony of losing her young son. Reading Kushner’s book isn’t easy, but it’s a gripping and eye-opening portrait of a staggeringly large population that’s often dehumanised and ignored.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Two-time National Book Award finalist Kushner (The Flamethrowers) delivers a heartbreaking and unforgettable novel set in a California women's prison. Single mother Romy Leslie Hall is serving two consecutive life sentences at the Stanville Women's Correctional Facility after murdering a stalker. From prison, she narrates her drug-addled, hard-bitten past in San Francisco, where she worked as a stripper at the legendary Mars Room, as well as her present, where she serves her sentence alongside inmates such as Conan (so masculine as to have been mistakenly sent to a men's prison), the heavy metal-loving white supremacist known as the Norse, and loquacious baby-killer Laura Lipp. Readers slowly learn the circumstances of Romy's conviction, and eventually glean a composite portrait of the justice system, including the story of Gordon Hauser, a well-meaning but naive English teacher assigned to Stanville, and a dirty LAPD cop, "Doc," who serves out a parallel sentence in the Sensitive Needs block of New Folsom Prison. But the focus is on the routine at Stanville, where Romy pines for her son, reads the books recommended to her by Gordon, recalls her past life in vivid and excruciating detail, and plans a daring escape. Kushner excels at capturing the minutiae of life behind bars and manages to critique the justice system, as well. Romy is a remarkable protagonist; her guilt is never in question, but her choices are understandable. Kushner's novel is notable for its holistic depiction of who gets wrapped up in incarceration families, lawyers, police, and prisoners; it deserves to be read with the same level of pathos, love, and humanity with which it clearly was written.
Customer Reviews
The MARS Room
Good read. Enjoyed the characters presented in this book, each having a story that contributed to why they were in jail. All unique and different paths. Interesting insight to life behind bars.