The Mars Room

Romy Hall has a son, a past, and the impossible sentence of two life terms plus six years to serve in a remote central California prison, which she's just beginning when this novel opens. If this is a great novel, and I think it might be, it's both because of what it gives you—a hungrily detailed and generously observed look at American prisons and prisoners—and what it withholds: easy judgments in a place where judgments have already been made, emotional reconciliations in a place designed to prevent them. Romy is good company, but in prison with her, you'll feel a growing ache of absence and distance, one that feels thoroughly true to the life she is serving out.