The Mars Room

Rachel Kushner

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The Mars Room won TIME's #1 Fiction Title of the Year, was a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book of 2018, was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal. 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 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.