The Mars Room
by Rachel Kushner
This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app
1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date 7 Jun 2018 | Archive Date 7 Jul 2018
Random House UK, Vintage Publishing | Jonathan Cape
Talking about this book? Use #TheMarsRoom #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!
Description
**LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018**
**THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER**
'An unforgettable novel.' DAILY TELEGRAPH
'More knowing about prison life [than Orange Is The New Black]... so powerful.' NEW YORK TIMES
'One of America's finest writers.' VOGUE
Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences, plus six years, at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility. Outside is the world from which she has been permanently severed: the San Francisco of her youth, changed almost beyond recognition. The Mars Room strip club where she once gave lap dances for a living. And her seven-year-old son, Jackson, now in the care of Romy’s estranged mother.
Inside is a new reality to adapt to: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive. The deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner details with humour and precision. Daily acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike. Allegiances formed over liquor brewed in socks, and stories shared through sewage pipes.
Romy sees the future stretch out ahead of her in a long, unwavering line – until news from outside brings a ferocious urgency to her existence, challenging her to escape her own destiny and culminating in a climax of almost unbearable intensity. Through Romy – and through a cast of astonishing characters populating The Mars Room – Rachel Kushner presents not just a bold and unsentimental panorama of life on the margins of contemporary America, but an excoriating attack on the prison-industrial complex.
Advance Praise
'The Mars Room is mysterious and irreducible. The writing is beautiful -- from hard precision to lyrical imagery, with a flawless feel for when to soar and when to pull back.' - Dana Spiotta
'The Mars Room is uniquely informed ... empathetic. An addictive novel, laced throughout with bracing intelligence.' - Joshua Ferris
'It's her best book yet, another big step forward.' - Jonathan Franzen
'The Mars Room offers a rare combination of admirably sure-footed sentences and a character and plot that made me stay up far too late. Romy’s situation is unbearable, and almost unbearably realised, but the writing is so very good and the ideas so expertly handled that it’s a great pleasure to read in all its devastation.' - Sarah Moss
'The Mars Room is so sensually convincing it leaves its imprint of steel mesh on your forehead, while its compassion embraces baby-killer and brutal cop alike in the merciless confines of the American justice system. An extraordinary literary achievement.' - Adam Thorpe
'I had to brace myself as I did for Hanya Yanagihara's A Little Life ... An unforgettable portrait of a life lived on the margins in contemporary America.' - Alice O'Keeffe, The Bookseller
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781910702673 |
| PRICE | £16.99 (GBP) |
| PAGES | 336 |
Readers who liked this book also liked:
