**LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018****A 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.` VOGUERomy 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. & 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 & precision. Daily acts of violence by guards & prisoners alike. Allegiances formed over liquor brewed in socks, & 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 & culminating in a climax of almost unbearable intensity. Through Romy
- & through a cast of astonishing characters populating The Mars Room
- Rachel Kushner presents not just a bold & unsentimental panorama of life on the margins of contemporary America, but an excoriating attack on the prison-industrial complex.