Editions

The Mars Room

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099589969

  • Length: 352  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 22mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 281g

  • RRP: £8.99

The Mars Room

  • Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the author of internationally acclaimed The Flamethrowers – a fearless and heartbreaking novel about love, friendship and incarceration.

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.

'Kushner is one of our most outstanding modern writers' STYLIST

'More knowing about prison life [than Orange Is The New Black]... so powerful' NEW YORK TIMES

'Breathtaking' VOGUE

  • Imprint: Vintage

  • ISBN: 9780099589969

  • Length: 352  Pages

  • Dimensions: 198mm x 22mm x 129mm

  • Weight: 281g

  • RRP: £8.99

Reviews

  • It is an unforgettable novel, and leaves the reader in no doubt that Kushner is one of America’s greatest living authors.

    Daily Telegraph

  • One of the greatest novels I have read in years. Her prior novel, The Flamethrowers, was expansive and thrilling, but this is richer and deeper, more ambitious in its moral vision… an exhilarating, always surprising read.

    Irish Times

  • When I finished reading The Mars Room, I immediately reread it because I didn’t want to leave its world… The Mars Room teems with quick and distinctive voices.

    Max Liu, Financial Times

  • Cements [Kushner's] status as one of America's finest writers.

    Vogue, **Must-Read Books of 2018**

  • I’ve been bowled over by Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room [about life in a women’s prison]. It’s astounding – very difficult to read but so beautifully done, and with such knowledge, although it doesn’t feel like a “researched” book.

    Anne Tyler, Observer

More from this Author

About the Author

Rachel Kushner

Rachel Kushner is the author of The Mars Room, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Her previous novels, Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers, were both New York Times bestsellers and finalists for the National Book Award. Her fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper’s and the Paris Review. She lives in Los Angeles.

Rachel Kushner

Read more

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Features

Rachel Kushner on hard living and fearless writing

Celebrated for her razor-sharp novels, now the author is releasing her first essay collection, The Hard Crowd. She talks to Kate Wyver about near-death experiences, partying with the Stones and refusing to be the 'moral centre' of her work.
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Features

A Reykjavik bookseller on why Iceland is the number one Christmas destination for book lovers

Books and Christmas go hand in hand for Icelanders. A country famous for its love of books and storytelling, Iceland has a uniquely rich literary heritage. Svanborg Þórdís Sigurðardóttir, a bookseller at Reykjavík’s famous Penninn Eymundsson bookshop, tells us what it’s like to work as a bookseller in Iceland at Christmas.
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Extracts

The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

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. Read an extract from her Man Booker Prize 2018 Shortlisted book, The Mars Room, below.

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