The Compound by Aisling Rawle
Published by Random House
Publication date: June 24, 2025
Bookshop
The premise of Aisling Rawle’s The Compound is straightforward: a reality competition show where 20 young, healthy, beautiful strangers are dropped into an estate located in the middle of a desert. They have tasks to complete and will receive rewards for completing them. Some are communal, meaning everyone must participate, and others are personal. The other main criteria is that they must share a bed with the member of the opposite sex every night. Anyone waking up alone in the morning is immediately banished.
Lily is the narrator, a stunning young woman who’s wanted to escape the grind of her life in an increasingly toxic world and get on the show for years. Through her eyes we meet the other contestants and watch the competition unfold. She is The Compound’s sole source of evaluation and as the pages pass proves herself to be as shallow and consumeristic as expected while still displaying a survival instinct that serves her well as other contestants are betrayed and banished.
While The Compound will be catnip to reality television enthusiasts Rawles goes far beyond the mechanics such shows entail—isolating a group of people, creating tension via competition, encouraging rampant greed and duplicity. These are the novel’s bare bones, but with the same finesse a seasoned producer uses, Rawle pulls the reader further into a controlled environment until they’re as fully immersed in what’s happening as the contestants themselves. But while the resulting dopamine hit keeps attention glued on the more salacious aspects of people doing unpleasant things for personal gain, Rawle is breaking down the complexities of motivations, desires, and dark sides of each character as they are inevitably revealed in the passing weeks.
It all comes together in The Compound to take the ratings juggernaut concept of competition reality shows and peel away the translucent film that keeps them shiny and bright, revealing just how grubby they get after being pawed through by human emotions. Slippery, sneaky, addictive reading.
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*I received a free copy of this book from Random House in exchange for an honest review.*
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