The Mars Room

Rachel Kushner Press Reviews

It is an unforgettable novel, and leaves the reader in no doubt that Kushner is one of America's greatest living authors. - Daily Telegraph

One of the greatest novels I have read in years. Her prior novel, The Flamethrowers, was expansive and thrilling, but this is richer and deeper, more ambitious in its moral vision... an exhilarating, always surprising read. - Irish Times

When I finished reading The Mars Room, I immediately reread it because I didn't want to leave its world... The Mars Room teems with quick and distinctive voices. -- Max Liu - Financial Times

Cements [Kushner's] status as one of America's finest writers. - Vogue

I've been bowled over by Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room [about life in a women's prison]. It's astounding - very difficult to read but so beautifully done, and with such knowledge, although it doesn't feel like a researched book. -- Anne Tyler - Observer

If you haven't heard of Rachel Kushner yet, you soon will. The American novelist has earned comparisons to Jennifer Egan and Jonathan Franzen... [The Mars Room] makes for a compelling read. Imagine a darker version of Orange Is The New Black . - Sunday Times Style

Rachel Kushner's The Mars Room shows what happens when a smart writer gets truly serious. It is a necessary and compelling book, and this year's must read. -- Anne Enright It's her best book yet, another big step forward. -- Jonathan Franzen Gritty, empathetic, finely rendered, no sugary toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled. -- Margaret Atwood, on Twitter This unflinching and immersive portrait of prison life is a worthy follow-up to The Flamethrowers... Kushner's prose fizzes as dangerously as the electric fence around Stanville, her observations spiky as barbed wire, her humour desert-sky dark... [The Mars Room] marks you like a tattoo. - Guardian

A jail novel every bit as brutal as those of Edward Bunker or Stephen King... The prose is beautifully composed and the narrative never goes where you expect it. Kushner thinks herself startlingly well into the minds of warped men. The ending is stunning. - Evening Standard

A portrait of contemporary America from one of the literary world's most exciting emerging writers. - Evening Standard

Manages to be a novel with its own worldview and its own textures, as much as a chronicle of a system that holds more prisoners per head of population than any other country in the world. -- Colm Toibin Ambitious, astute, serious and profound, The Mars Room catapults Kushner into the American major league, along with Jonathan Franzen, Annie Proulx and Joyce Carol Oates. - iNews

Both more blackly comic and more knowing about prison life [than Orange Is The New Black ]... It's one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart... so powerful. - New York Times

Kushner is a young master. I honestly don't know how she is able to know so much and convey all of this in such a completely entertaining and mesmerizing way. -- George Saunders Kushner is going to be one we turn to for our serious pleasures and for the insight and wisdom we'll be needing in hard times to come. She is a novelist of the very first order. -- Robert Stone Rachel Kushner's third, extraordinarily accomplished novel, The Mars Room, glows with... authentic hyper-detail... She succeeds beautifully. - Spectator

You sense early in this novel that you're entering Mary Gaitskill, Denis Johnson and Charles Bukowski territory... Kushner offers a great, subversive portrait of... life inside the women's prison... grainy and persuasive. -- Dwight Garner - New York Times

Urgent, terrifying and fascinating... Told with unswerving precision... Kushner is one of our most outstanding modern writers. - Stylist