The Mars Room

It's 2003 and Romy Hall 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: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. 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. The novel also tells the story of Gordon Hauser, an academic teaching inmates at the prison.

The novel was well-received by critics. In The Irish Times, critic Rob Doyle called The Mars Room "one of the greatest novels I have read in years."[4] Doyle added, "Her prior novel, The Flamethrowers, was expansive and thrilling, but this is richer and deeper, more ambitious in its moral vision." In The Guardian, critic Lisa Allardice called the novel "unflinching and immersive," writing, "Kushner’s prose fizzes as dangerously as the electric fence around Stanville, her observations spiky as barbed wire, her humour desert-sky dark."[5] The Los Angeles Times called the novel "devastating".[6]

The Mars Room was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. On November 5, 2018, The Mars Room received France's Prix Médicis Étranger.

• The New York Times Book Review on The Mars Room
• Dwight Garner in The New York Times on The Mars Room
• The Irish Times on The Mars Room
• The Yale Review on The Mars Room
• Rachel Kushner in The New Yorker on writing The Mars Room