The Mars Room

Rachel Kushner

2018

Full alum tawed goatskin with reverse offset printing, vellum overlay, holographic tooling. Doublures of handmade paper with printing and vellum overlay. Endpapers printed and inked with manuscript writing.

To watch a short film about the binding of this book featured on BBC The One Show please go to my Publicity page.

This tells the story of how Romy, a stripper at the Mars Room, came to receive a life sentence for killing her stalker and explores what it means to be poor and female in America today. The clouded vellum wraps around the book like the all encompassing fog on the streets of San Francisco where the book is set. Inside the stalker whispers her name over and over again. And the hand written statistics quantify the harsh reality of life as a sex worker and a victim of stalking.

More women are employed by the sex industry than at any other time in history. Women in the sex industry experience post traumatic stress disorder at rates equivalent to veterans of combat war. Up to 90% of women in the sex industry were abused as children. They face significantly higher rates of drug addiction, sexually transmitted diseases, violent assaults and mental health problems than the general population. 89% of women said they wanted to escape but had no other means of survival. 70% of strippers reported that they had been followed home and 42% say they have been stalked. There are more strip clubs in the United States than any other nation in the world. There are 1.39 million victims of commercial sexual servitude.

London: Jonathan Cape. 2018.

265 x 165 x 50 mm

Commission by The Booker Prize for presentation to the author.