The Mars House: A BBC Radio 2 Book Club Pick (Paperback) - Natasha Pulley

When an apocalyptic dust storm engulfs Mars, cutting off power to the capital, a refugee and a politician must find a way to make the PR stunt that is their hastily arranged marriage work in order to save the planet.

'Pure Pulley' STUART TURTON
'Joyful and profound' CATRIONA WARD
'Simply unputdownable' THOMAS D. LEE

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.

About the Author

NATASHA PULLEY is the internationally bestselling author of The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, The Bedlam Stacks, The Lost Future of Pepperharrow, The Kingdoms, and The Half Life of Valery K. She has won a Betty Trask Award, been shortlisted for the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award, the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award, and the Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize, and been longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize.