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.

The Compound quotes

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