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.

Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing, pageantry, and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living.

[4] In The Irish Times, critic Rob Doyle called The Mars Room "one of the greatest novels I have read in years.

In The Guardian, critic Lisa Allardice called the novel "unflinching and immersive," writing, "Kushner’s prose fizzes as dangerously as the electric fence around Stanville, her observations spiky as barbed wire, her humour desert-sky dark.

"[10] The Mars Room was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.