The Mars House

Reviews

Fans of such stories will be richly entertained by the lavish world-building and breakneck plotting of Natasha Pulley's The Kingdoms…Beautiful, surreal imagery appears throughout the novel, too . . . Clear a weekend if you can, and let yourself be absorbed. Natasha Pulley builds a surreal world that slowly reveals immense dangers. It's an absorbing Cold War thriller as well as a tribute to courage and determination. Brilliantly conceived, vibrantly realized, and complexly suspenseful. Natasha Pulley heads to the gulags, then to an atomic village, in her latest to combine fast-paced action and imaginative settings with beautifully developed queer relationships. Natasha Pulley toys with gender norms and unexpected queer romance in this novel with obvious real-world implications, as the best sci-fi offers time and again. Already one of my favorite 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. Pulley astonishes in this thorny and addictive sci-fi romance. Full of charming details and gender-bending gallantry, this imaginative thriller is a pleasure to read. 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). Pulley has wrapped an enemies-to-lovers, fake-marriage romance in a fascinating sf-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. An incredibly ambitious novel . . . The Mars House is a complex and captivating story. Few writers combine such warmth and heart with such consummate skill at Natasha Pulley. She sends the reader our into the skies, and deep into themselves, places we never knew we could travel. Reading her is both a joyful and profound experience—and The Mars House is her most daring, ambitious and exciting book yet. Delightful . . . The Mars House moves as nimbly as its ballet-dancer hero . . . pivoting toward something that’s both nuanced and fresh. The result is both an epic love story and a deft political thriller. [A] futuristic blend of science fiction and romance that uses its alien setting to explore . . . climate change, immigration, gender ideology, and political corruption . . . an utterly unique and gently beautiful love story rooted in a complicated exploration of our need for connection and a place to call home . . . the sort of book that will stick with you long after you reach its final page. This book has everything. Intergalactic climate refugees! Slow-burn queer romance! Gender-fluid aliens! Political intrigue with a whiff of murder! Natasha Pulley’s newest seems to defy categorization, but I’d venture to guess it’ll appeal to fans of Ursula K. Le Guin, N.K. Jemisin, and Mary Doria Russell. Plus, Pulley wrote one of my favorite books of 2015, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street—a twisty-turny steampunky historical fiction tale—that I still think about often. This one promises to be just as thrilling. The Mars House is narratively compelling . . . and stylistically welcoming, with a wit that tends towards whimsy. [V]isionary . . . Subverting a tale about creeping interplanetary fascism with the power of profound, even reckless compassion, The Mars House is a dazzling novel about humanity’s future. British bestselling author Natasha Pulley is best known for historical fiction, but in The Mars House, she imagines a world in the future . . . If you love Isaac Asimov and Margaret Atwood for their speculative look at what the future may hold, you won’t be able to put down The Mars House. Pulley doesn’t dodge the big questions her premise raises, but she also develops a living, breathing relationship between two complicated people. In a year full of unconventional romances, The Mars House is probably the oddest, and yet the sweetest. Engrossing and absolutely impossible to put down. The novel—set on Mars in a vaguely distant apocalyptic future—will likely be the most immersive, surprising, charming book I'll read all year. Absolutely riveting. [A] captivating and thought-provoking science fiction novel that explores complex themes of identity, belonging, and the human condition in a richly imagined future world . . . Pulley’s prose is elegant and engaging, balancing moments of humor and heartbreak with equal skill . . . [A] remarkable achievement. Expand reviews