Name: The Compound
Rating: 4.022727272727272 (22 reviews)

Aisling Rawle

You wake up in a compound in the middle of the desert, along with nine other women.

All of you are young, all beautiful, all keen to escape the grinding poverty, political unrest and environmental catastrophe of the outside world.

You realise that cameras are tracking your every move, broadcasting to millions of reality TV fans.

Soon, ten men will arrive on foot – if they all survive the journey.

What will you have to do to win?

And what happens to the losers?

The Compound

Lindsay

I’ve always been a passive kind of person; it is both my worst quality and the thing that people like most about me.

Intelligence can be artificial, but charm is always real

Possibly the rule of finding someone to pair up with had been intended as a way to offset the selfishness of pursuing rewards, but as I lay there, looking at the boys around me, the rule only felt like a cruel exaggeration of our ideas of desire and desirability.

They didn’t know beauty, these boys. They saw blurred outlines and thought they knew the picture.

Such a good concept. The writing was like something I have never read before…. even though it explicitly said everything was fine there was always an underlying unease about the book which was so interesting.

There was alot of ambiguity around the outside world which added to mystery but I would have loved for that to be delved into deeper to understand why contestants would want to participate in the show

Interesting take/perspective on materialism, over consumption and loneliness

Something did feel missing about the book but that also felt like the whole point of it…the characters never reached the fulfilment they were looking for

Ella Williams

Such a good concept. The writing was like something I have never read before…. even though it explicitly said everything was fine there was always an underlying unease about the book which was so interesting.

There was alot of ambiguity around the outside world which added to mystery but I would have loved for that to be delved into deeper to understand why contestants would want to participate in the show

Interesting take/perspective on materialism, over consumption and loneliness

Something did feel missing about the book but that also felt like the whole point of it…the characters never reached the fulfilment they were looking for

I put this one off for far too long and then read it in two days, unable to put it down. The Compound is gripping in the specific way a train wreck is gripping. You do not look away even when part of you wants to.

The premise does a lot of the work, and it earns its keep. Lily wakes on a remote desert compound alongside nineteen other beautiful young contestants, filmed constantly, competing to outlast one another for luxury rewards while the world beyond the walls falls apart. Reality television, except Rawle puts you inside a contestant's head rather than in front of the screen. The voyeurism of that setup is the draw, and it will pull a lot of readers straight in.

What surprised me is what Rawle refuses to give you. Come expecting the familiar machinery of a reality dating show, the romance, the scheming, the manipulation, and you will find very little of it. There is barely any love or sex, and almost none of the calculated backstabbing the format trains you to anticipate. The withholding is deliberate, and it is the most interesting decision in the book. Instead of trashy chaos, the novel becomes a quiet, vaguely dystopian satire about performance culture and consumerism, about a world organised around acquiring things for profit or comfort, about suffering in pursuit of an invisible thread toward a happiness that never arrives. I went in expecting a love story, or a thriller, and got something stranger and more thoughtful than either. It has thriller elements but not enough to be one, and that is fine, because that was never really the point. 

My reservations are real, though. I wanted more unhinged than I got. The restraint is smart, but it occasionally reads as the book underdelivering on the appetite its own premise creates. The ending felt rushed and left me without closure, as if it ran out of road. Lily is a deliberately blank narrator, more a window than a person, and here is my honest uncertainty: if that flatness is intentional, a comment on people performing emptiness for cameras, then it works conceptually, but it still could have been made more interesting on the page. And the novel raises bisexuality and queerness only to drop both without development, which is the clearest example of a wider habit. It gestures at themes it never fully opens.

The prose serves the story and rarely rises above that. There is nothing here to quote for its own beauty, and I did not mind, because this book runs on premise and momentum rather than sentences. Both carried me.

3.75 stars. Smarter and more substantial than its glossy reality-TV hook suggests, held back by a rushed finish and a handful of threads left hanging.

Michelle Dsouza

I put this one off for far too long and then read it in two days, unable to put it down. The Compound is gripping in the specific way a train wreck is gripping. You do not look away even when part of you wants to.

The premise does a lot of the work, and it earns its keep. Lily wakes on a remote desert compound alongside nineteen other beautiful young contestants, filmed constantly, competing to outlast one another for luxury rewards while the world beyond the walls falls apart. Reality television, except Rawle puts you inside a contestant's head rather than in front of the screen. The voyeurism of that setup is the draw, and it will pull a lot of readers straight in.

What surprised me is what Rawle refuses to give you. Come expecting the familiar machinery of a reality dating show, the romance, the scheming, the manipulation, and you will find very little of it. There is barely any love or sex, and almost none of the calculated backstabbing the format trains you to anticipate. The withholding is deliberate, and it is the most interesting decision in the book. Instead of trashy chaos, the novel becomes a quiet, vaguely dystopian satire about performance culture and consumerism, about a world organised around acquiring things for profit or comfort, about suffering in pursuit of an invisible thread toward a happiness that never arrives. I went in expecting a love story, or a thriller, and got something stranger and more thoughtful than either. It has thriller elements but not enough to be one, and that is fine, because that was never really the point. 

My reservations are real, though. I wanted more unhinged than I got. The restraint is smart, but it occasionally reads as the book underdelivering on the appetite its own premise creates. The ending felt rushed and left me without closure, as if it ran out of road. Lily is a deliberately blank narrator, more a window than a person, and here is my honest uncertainty: if that flatness is intentional, a comment on people performing emptiness for cameras, then it works conceptually, but it still could have been made more interesting on the page. And the novel raises bisexuality and queerness only to drop both without development, which is the clearest example of a wider habit. It gestures at themes it never fully opens.

The prose serves the story and rarely rises above that. There is nothing here to quote for its own beauty, and I did not mind, because this book runs on premise and momentum rather than sentences. Both carried me.

3.75 stars. Smarter and more substantial than its glossy reality-TV hook suggests, held back by a rushed finish and a handful of threads left hanging.

This turned out to be a really addicting read! 

At first I wasn’t too sure if I’d stick with it because I was a bit overwhelmed with all the characters but once the plot started to pick up and the drama ensued, I couldn’t stop reading it!

It was like Love Island but with more psychological warfare.

I know many didn’t really like the ending but I quite liked how abrupt it was. It kinda lets the readers guess what happens after Lilly leaves the compound because much like reality tv, we really don’t know what happens after the cameras cut.

Essence

This turned out to be a really addicting read! 

At first I wasn’t too sure if I’d stick with it because I was a bit overwhelmed with all the characters but once the plot started to pick up and the drama ensued, I couldn’t stop reading it!

It was like Love Island but with more psychological warfare.

I know many didn’t really like the ending but I quite liked how abrupt it was. It kinda lets the readers guess what happens after Lilly leaves the compound because much like reality tv, we really don’t know what happens after the cameras cut.

so good, it felt like i was watching the show. compelling from start to finish.

jacq bridge

amy jacobowitz

i enjoyed this way more than i thought i would. love island meets i who have never known men

abi a

ashley

Went into this knowing next to nothing about it and ended up loving it. I felt completely gripped throughout and equally unsettled. Really interesting premise!

Beth Bartholomew

Chloé Dupèré

** A BBC RADIO 2 BOOK CLUB PICK ** ‘Lord of the Flies meets Love Island – dark, thrilling, and delightfully twisted’ LOUISE O'NEILL 'So gripping and propulsive that it beats reality TV at its own game. Why watch TV when Aisling Rawle does it better?' TORREY PETERS 'THIS is the book to read this summer... 10 out of 10' CECELIA AHERN

The Compound

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