The Mars Room
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
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2.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $17.99
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.
‘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.
