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  • The Mars Room

  • A Novel
  • Written by: Rachel Kushner
  • Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
  • Length: 9 hrs and 41 mins
  • 3.8 out of 5 stars (38 ratings)

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The Mars Room cover art

The Mars Room

Written by: Rachel Kushner
Narrated by: Rachel Kushner
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Publisher's Summary

Featuring original music by Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon! 

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." 

©2018 Rachel Kushner (P)2018 Simon & Schuster

What listeners say about The Mars Room

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  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Enjoyed it a lot!!

I did like this book a lot and think the author did a great job of narrating. Because this was an audio book with 1 narrator it would have been helpful to know who was "speaking" at times. Especially the extracts from the diaries of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. I actually had to look it up because I thought it might have been Gordon or I was missing a character. I will try other books by Rachel Kushner.

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars

Going nowhere

I could not get into it and I thought it would come together in the end but no luck.

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  • Overall
    5 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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Wow

What a trip into the banal yet tragic world of these characters. What I liked: it feels real and honest, with no sensationalism or sentimentality. Rachel Kushner is a truly gifted writer.

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