The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner

This absorbing work “conjures a hard-boiled vision of life in a maximum-security women’s prison”, said Nick Curtis in the London Evening Standard. Rachel Kushner is best known for The Flamethrowers, her acclaimed second novel about art and motorbikes. In her latest, Romy Hall, a San Francisco lap dancer, is serving a double life sentence for killing her stalker. Through her, Kushner explores the brutal stratifications of prison life: the hatred of baby-killers, the casual racism. But this is also a novel about the “San Francisco tourists don’t see, where a hopeless underclass gets funnelled into drugs and crime”.

Kushner’s depiction of US criminal justice is a “masterclass in banal horror”, said Sarah Crown in the Literary Review. The Mars Room is a “bleak and bitter interrogation” of modern America. There’s no doubting its ambition, but it doesn’t always succeed as a work of fiction, said Johanna Thomas-Corr in The Times. Kushner’s focus on the “accumulation of detail” often comes at the expense of coherence. “The result is a novel that is abundant, but empty.”