NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER &; 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 &;Gritty, empathetic, finely rendered, no sugary toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled.&; &;Margaret Atwood via Twitter &;A page turner&;one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart.&; &;The New York Times Book Review (cover review) &;Brilliant and devastating&;a heartbreaking, true, and nearly flawless novel.&; &;NPR &;With her richly textured third novel, Kushner certifies her place as one of the great American novelists of the twenty-first century.&; &;Entertainment Weekly From twice National Book Award&;nominated Rachel Kushner, whose Flamethrowers was called &;the best, most brazen, most interesting book of the year&; (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine), comes a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America.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, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision. Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner&;s work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined. As James Wood said in The New Yorker, her fiction &;succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive.&; Read Less