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The Mars Room

A Novel

by Rachel Kushner

Narrator Rachel Kushner

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Length 9 hours 41 minutes

Language English

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Bookseller recommendation

“Told from the perspectives of prisoners, victims, and staff, Kushner’s stunning depiction of a women’s prison centers on Romy Hall, twenty-nine and serving two life sentences for killing her stalker. Because she worked as a lap dancer, her public defender believed she’d hurt her case if she testified, so her story never came out in court. That’s just one of many outrages Romy is helpless to address. Worse is discovering she’s lost parental rights to her seven-year-old. Even so, the knowledge that her son exists is Romy’s life line. He gives her courage to endure, and even to plan a kind of future—even in the age of mass incarceration, which, the prisoners note, has made prison more horrifying than it was before.”
— Laurie G. • Politics & Prose

Bookseller recommendation

“The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner gives insight into life behind prison walls as well as the kind of lives lived that might land one there. Actually, many stories are bound together in this unique novel. A former stripper in for life without parole, a prison GED teacher and a dirty cop are the primary storytellers along with a host of colorful cell mates and acquaintances. The backstories are particularly interesting as there are so many commonalities regarding current social maladies: single parenthood, drugs, poverty, neglect and poor education to name a few. Grimly realistic and fascinating.”
— Phyllis • Wellesley Books

Bookseller recommendation

“Rachel Kushner writes some seriously smart and gorgeous prose, so when she headed to prison in The Mars Room, I went. It is dark. It is painful. At times, the level of detail in the book and its fabulously invented and drawn characters make it feel like a documentary. We are struggling with so many social justice issues across the country right now it is overwhelming, and I worried that The Mars Room would push me over the edge. Instead, I couldn't stop reading. What really happened? Who is to blame? How will things turn out? How can we make things better? Ultimately, Kushner's great success is profoundly illustrating a very simple message: It's complicated.”
— Sara Hinckley • Hudson Booksellers

Summary
About the author
About the narrator

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, named after a German actress, 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: her young son, Jackson, and the San Francisco of her youth. 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, portrayed with great humor and precision.

Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room is “wholly authentic…profound…luminous” (The Wall Street Journal), “one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart” (The New York Times Book Review, cover review)—a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined and “affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists” (Entertainment Weekly).

Fiction Mystery & Thriller Fiction - Literary

Rachel Kushner is the author of the New York Times bestseller Creation Lake, her latest novel; The Hard Crowd, her acclaimed essay collection; and the internationally bestselling novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers, and Telex from Cuba, as well as a book of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K. She has won the Prix Médicis and been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Folio Prize, and was twice a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award in Fiction. Creation Lake was also longlisted for the National Book Award. She is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and the recipient of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages.