For software transactional memory (STM) to be usable in large applications such as databases, it needs to be robust, i.e., live, efficient, tolerant of crashed and non-terminating transactions, and practical. In this paper, we study the question of whether one can implement a robust software transactional memory in an asynchronous system. To that end, we introduce a system model – the multicore system model (MSM) – which captures the properties provided by mainstream multicore systems. We show how to implement a robust software transactional memory (RobuSTM) in MSM. Our experimental evaluation indicates that RobuSTM compares well against existing blocking and nonblocking software transactional memories in terms of performance while providing a much higher degree of robustness.