The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. This reading group guide for The Mars Room includes an introduction, discussion questions, and ideas for enhancing your book club.

It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined and “affirms Rachel Kushner as one of our best novelists” ( Entertainment Weekly).

Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room is “wholly authentic…profound…luminous” ( The Wall Street Journal), “one of those books that enrage you even as they break your heart” ( The New York Times Book Review, cover review)-a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. 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, portrayed with great humor and precision. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: her young son, Jackson, and the San Francisco of her youth. It’s 2003 and Romy Hall, named after a German actress, is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. FINALIST for the MAN BOOKER PRIZE and t he NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDĪn instant New York Times bestseller from two-time National Book Award finalist Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room earned tweets from Margaret Atwood-“gritty, empathic, finely rendered, no sugar toppings, and a lot of punches, none of them pulled”-and from Stephen King-“ The Mars Room is the real deal, jarring, horrible, compassionate, funny.”

Rachel kushner the mars room