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Dystopia now
Rachel Kushner's new novel bucks the trend of apocalyptic near-future fiction in the US, says CALUM BARNES
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JAMIE BRITTON recommends that we all buy at least two copies of a remarkable book of poems
The Mars Room
by Rachel Kushner
(Jonathan Cape, £16.99)
IN HER previous work Rachel Kushner's focus was on colonial exploitation and the fraying of Fordism and now, in The Mars Room, she turns a novelist's eye on the carceral capitalism of the early 21st century United States.
Unlike the dystopian turn of much US writing in the Trump era, best crystallised in the success of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Kushner’s novel serves as a rejoinder to this trend. It rudely reminds us that dystopia is here already.
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