Our Book of the Week this week is The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner, the hotly anticipated new novel from the author of The Flamethrowers. 
It is 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at a women's prison. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth, and her young son. Inside is a world operating on its own mechanisms: thousands of women scrabbling to survive, and a power structure based on violence and absurdity. 

>> Read Stella's review. 

>> Stella reviews the book on Radio NZ National. 

>> Rachel Kushner thinks prisons should exist only in fiction. 

>> How Kushner learned about the American prison industry. 

>> Standing up for the guilty. 

>> Kushner discusses the book. 

>> The final sentence. 

>> Rachel Kushner at VOLUME.