Fallen women stripped bare makes for uneasy reading

FICTION: The Mars Room, Rachel Kushner, Jonathan Cape, €19.55

The Mars Room is the name of a fictional strip club, but Rachel Kushner’s novel, her third after Telex from Cuba and The Flamethrowers, is set predominantly inside a prison. Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility is a sprawling, pink-hued, panoptical limbo in California’s Central Valley. The plot follows Romy Hall, a young mother serving a double life sentence for the murder of her stalker.

As ...