Title: The Compound
Author: Aisling Rawle
Publisher: Random House
Publication date: June 24, 2025
Length: 292 pages
Genre: Contemporary/dystopian fiction
Source: Purchased
Rating:

Nothing to lose. Everything to gain. Winner takes all.

Lily—a bored, beautiful twentysomething—wakes up on a remote desert compound alongside nineteen other contestants on a popular reality TV show. To win, she must outlast her housemates while competing in challenges for luxury rewards, such as champagne and lipstick, and communal necessities to outfit their new home, like food, appliances, and a front door.

The cameras are catching all her angles, good and bad, but Lily has no desire to leave: Why would she, when the world outside is falling apart? As the competition intensifies, intimacy between the players deepens, and it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish between desire and desperation. When the producers raise the stakes, forcing contestants into upsetting, even dangerous situations, the line between playing the game and surviving it begins to blur. If Lily makes it to the end, she’ll receive prizes beyond her wildest dreams—but what will she have to do to win?

Addictive and prescient, The Compound is an explosive debut from a major new voice in fiction and will linger in your mind long after the game ends.

Take reality TV — Big Brother, Love Island, even Survivor — then mix in a big dose of dystopian, Hunger Games, do-what-it-takes-to-last vibes… and you might get a smidge of what reading The Compound feels like.

It’s strange right from the start. Lily — beautiful, fit, in her 20s — wakes up in a bedroom in a place known as the compound. One other bed is occupied, by another beautiful young woman. As they rise, they move through the main house, finding clothes — shabby cast-offs, mainly — and odds and ends. They’re familiar with the house’s layout, and know what to look for. The place is a mess — grimy, trash everywhere, and the bathroom and front entryway don’t even have doors.

The compound itself is surrounded by nothing but desert as far as the eye can see, and a barrier of barbed wire and some fencing, none of it seeming all that sturdy, stand between the compound and the wilderness beyond.

As they leave the house and wander the grounds — a large pool, gardens, a pond, an orchard — they find more young women in various stages of waking. Soon, there are ten of them. And then they start talking about waiting for the boys to arrive. (Yes, one of the oddly disturbing elements of this book is that they refer to themselves as “boys” and “girls”, although all are adults.)

We were assessing who was the most beautiful and who might cause trouble. At the same time, we were analyzing what our own place in the group might be. Within minutes of speaking to the girls, I knew that I was one of the most beautiful, and one of the least interesting.

After two days, the boys arrive, straggling in from across the desert. They arrive bruised, battered, and having clearly been through something — but ready to play.

Because, we quickly learn, this is reality TV, and the compound is the setting of one of the most popular competition shows. Ten boys and ten girls are dropped into the compound — the girls, apparently drugged, are left in the house to wake there and begin the game, while the boys must trek across the desert to reach the compound. Once there, they compete via communal tasks to earn basics and more for the house — everything from food items to wood to chairs (of which there are none when the group arrives). The players also have personal tasks that they can perform for more individualized rewards, from beauty basics to (later) luxury items. Personal tasks tends to be odd and embarrassing, with a rule that players can’t tell one another when they’re carrying out a personal task — so if, for example, the task is to insult someone else, they just have to do it, no explanations allowed. They can choose not to, of course, but then they forego the reward, and no one seems willing to let prizes slip by.

One simple, even fun task, and something new would appear. What tedium I would have to go through to get the same things at home: standing on my feet for hours, faking smiles, pretending to have energy and enthusiasm. When I slept, I dreamed of prizes falling from the sky, and all of us standing in the desert with our arms outstretched, waiting for them to reach us.

There are even more rules: To remain in the game, you must wake up with a player of the opposite sex in your bed. If you wake up alone, you’re immediately banished, sent off into the desert (although banished players are apparently picked up and sent back home, not left to wander) and never to be seen again.

The ultimate goal is to be the last person left at the compound. The prize? You get to stay there for as long as you’d like — theoretically forever — and get any reward you can think to ask for (so long as you thank the brand that provides it — sponsorship opportunities are everywhere!). Although, from what we learn, the winner who stayed the longest left after six weeks — so maybe it’s not all that great after all?

I don’t want to give too much away — but there are hints from the beginning that this show (and this book) is a step beyond its real-world reality TV parallels. The contestants live in a state of risk, tedium, and pleasure at first. The house is dirty when they arrive, and the lack of basics — doors and chairs! — is odd in the extreme, especially in contrast to the beautiful pool. But the rewards make clear that any improvement come from doing tasks, the more the better, and the communal tasks must be done by all.

At first, they’re mostly benign, but quickly escalate from the boys and girls having to line each other up according to who’s the best-looking to a challenge where each person has to hold their bedmate’s head under water for sixty seconds. There’s an important reward on the line — and certain contestants are willing to ignore their partners’ discomfort or fear in order to make sure they win.

The book offers lots of commentary on materialism and attractiveness, but we get hints too that something isn’t quite right in this world. Lily, our main character, wonders if any of the boys have fought in the wars already. Mentions of these undefined wars are sprinkled throughout the book — we know nothing further about the why or where of it all, but clearly, there are lives being lost at an alarming rate. The desert surrounding the compound seems beset by random brush fires. And even in their outside lives, we get the sense that getting by is a daily grind — why wouldn’t Lily perform an unpleasant task to gain a gorgeous dress, knowing just how many hours of slogging through her menial job it would take to even come close to affording it?

As the story twists its way forward, the game and the players become crueler and crueler, and yet, there are also friendships, and some bedmates even find love. But having a bedmate is critical to survival in the compound, so can these relationships actually be genuine?

The Compound is a fascinating, absorbing read that’s disturbing on so many levels, yet impossible to look away from. It magnifies all the worst aspects of real-world reality TV, placing them in a scenario in which people’s worst tendencies are not only approved but encouraged. Eventually, those who make it far in the game are allowed to resort to violence, and the game itself metes out shocking punishments for those who disobey the rules. The worst is likely what happens when the late-stage players seem to be getting too comfortable and managing to avoid blatant conflict — the following scenes are probably the most horrifying in the book, and strongly reminded me of scenes in The Hunger Games where the gamemakers lose patience with the pace and force ever greater dangers onto the tributes.

I can truly say that I’ve never read anything quite like The Compound before. It’s easy to see why GMA Book Club chose this one — this would make amazing fodder for a book group discussion.

I recommend The Compound for its twisted take on reality TV, the strangeness of the plot, and the tremendous food for thought.

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