The Mars House
On sale
19th March 2024
Price: £20
‘Pure Pulley’ STUART TURTON
‘Joyful and profound’ CATRIONA WARD
‘Simply unputdownable’ THOMAS D. LEE
‘A work of staggering genius’ IMRAN MAHMOOD
‘Charming and funny and perfectly paced’ TEMI OH
‘A spiritual heir to Terry Pratchett’ ROBIN STEVENS
‘Book of the year for me’ LAUREN JAMES
January Stirling was one of the principal dancers of London’s Royal Ballet. Now he’s a climate refugee bound for Tharsis, the notorious terraformed colony on Mars. It’s a utopia for the naturalised population. For January, as a dangerous Earthstronger whose body is unadjusted to the weaker Martian gravity, it’s a life sentence to hard labour and ferocious discrimination.
But he will live.
Aubrey Gale, energy trillionaire and hereditary senator, is running for election on a hardline platform to protect the native population from dangerous immigrants. The path to equality is simple, requiring all Earthstrongers who choose to come to Mars to undergo the disabling and sometimes fatal process of surgical naturalisation.
Which is no life at all.
When a disastrous media encounter plunges Aubrey and January’s lives into chaos, the solution is a five-year made-for-reality-TV marriage that could secure January’s future and ensure Aubrey’s political success . . . but it soon becomes clear that thousands of lives hang in the balance, and nothing is as it seems.
Timely and utterly unputdownable, The Mars House is an exceptional genre-blending story about privilege, strength, life, and love across class divisions – perfect for fans of Babel by R.F. Kuang, The Ferryman by Justin Cronin, and This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
‘Joyful and profound’ CATRIONA WARD
‘Simply unputdownable’ THOMAS D. LEE
‘A work of staggering genius’ IMRAN MAHMOOD
‘Charming and funny and perfectly paced’ TEMI OH
‘A spiritual heir to Terry Pratchett’ ROBIN STEVENS
‘Book of the year for me’ LAUREN JAMES
January Stirling was one of the principal dancers of London’s Royal Ballet. Now he’s a climate refugee bound for Tharsis, the notorious terraformed colony on Mars. It’s a utopia for the naturalised population. For January, as a dangerous Earthstronger whose body is unadjusted to the weaker Martian gravity, it’s a life sentence to hard labour and ferocious discrimination.
But he will live.
Aubrey Gale, energy trillionaire and hereditary senator, is running for election on a hardline platform to protect the native population from dangerous immigrants. The path to equality is simple, requiring all Earthstrongers who choose to come to Mars to undergo the disabling and sometimes fatal process of surgical naturalisation.
Which is no life at all.
When a disastrous media encounter plunges Aubrey and January’s lives into chaos, the solution is a five-year made-for-reality-TV marriage that could secure January’s future and ensure Aubrey’s political success . . . but it soon becomes clear that thousands of lives hang in the balance, and nothing is as it seems.
Timely and utterly unputdownable, The Mars House is an exceptional genre-blending story about privilege, strength, life, and love across class divisions – perfect for fans of Babel by R.F. Kuang, The Ferryman by Justin Cronin, and This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone.
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Reviews
Pulley astonishes in this thorny and addictive sci-fi romance
Few writers combine such warmth and heart with such consummate skill as Natasha Pulley... Reading her is both a joyful and profound experience - and The Mars House is her most daring, ambitious, and exciting book yet'
Already one of my favourite books of the year... There's palace intrigue, a slow-burn enemies-to-lovers plot, sassy footnotes, and also there are mammoths! It's a total delight from start to finish
Readers will appreciate all the delightful details of worldbuilding, character arcs, and slow romantic tension. Exquisitely layered and entertaining, Pulley's latest novel is a queer tale of planetary refugees, politics, and populist views (and mammoths).''Readers will appreciate all the delightful details of worldbuilding, character arcs, and slow romantic tension. Exquisitely layered and entertaining, Pulley's latest novel is a queer tale of planetary refugees, politics, and populist views (and mammoths)
Simply unputdownable - hilarious, ingenious, and full of warmth, The Mars House asks important questions about what it means to be human, and doesn't shy away from nuanced conversations about immigration, climate breakdown, and augmented reality. Plus it has talking mammoths and a very clever twist. What's not to love?
Pulley has wrapped an enemies-to-lovers, fake-marriage romance in a fascinating sci-fi world package... Magnetic... Charming... Readers will have incredible fun reading about this slow-burn romance, the itch of two creepy background mysteries, and a delightful scene involving judgmental mammoths
This is a book about language, how new society subcultures form, gender, mammoths, and space... I want to live inside Natasha Pulley's brain - and I would happily read a thousand more pages set on Mars. The incredible arranged marriage queer romance was just an added bonus. Book of the year for me