BookBrowse Reviews The Compound by Aisling Rawle

BookBrowse:

Lily wakes one morning in a desert compound as the newest contestant on a popular reality television show in this gripping, psychologically unsettling literary debut.

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Apathetic twentysomething Lily is beautiful but otherwise unremarkable, as she will be the first to tell you. She's bored with her job and doesn't get along with her mom, who she lives with, and she doesn't have any talents or ambitions. She doesn't have to think twice about applying to get on the show—a popular reality television series that blends elements of Love Island and Survivor. Lily and nineteen other contestants find themselves living in a remote desert compound, where they have to work together to compete for prizes—some of them luxuries, some of them necessities, like food and furniture to outfit their home. All the women must sleep next to a male contestant and vice versa, and if a contestant fails to pair up, they will be banished from the compound.

Cameras are watching at all times, capturing every moment of the day, and this footage will be edited down to episodes that are aired daily, but Lily forgets about this almost immediately. These cameras aren't manned by a production crew—the contestants are entirely isolated and left to their own devices, with minimal rules about how they need to conduct themselves. The most critical rule is that they are not allowed to discuss their lives outside of the show, or an unspecified punishment will be administered. Contestants quickly learn a new way of conversing, where they don't talk about anything of consequence, they simply trade inane observations, which after only a few days starts to feel freeing rather than stifling to Lily and the others.

The novel takes place entirely within the compound, starting when Lily wakes up on her first day on the show, and we know very little about her personal life. We eventually learn what the contestants do for work in the outside world, but we don't know where they live, what their hobbies are, whether or not they have siblings. When details from outside slip in, there's a vaguely dystopian air to them—"the wars" are mentioned, climate disasters are hinted at, and there's an overwhelming sense of nihilism in the way that Lily thinks about her previous life compared to life in the compound, which she's willing to do anything to hold onto. To Lily and the other contestants, the outside world feels like it falls away entirely as the compound becomes their new reality.

"I tried to imagine what it would be like to go home. The endless talk of the wars, and the masks that we wore in the cities and big towns, and the dreary gray skies, and evenings in front of the television. [...] What did it matter to wake up at the same time every morning and wear the same clothes and try to eat more protein but less sugar, when an earthquake or tsunami or a bomb might end it all at any minute? Or maybe we would all continue to boil, slowly but surely, in the mess that we pretended was an acceptable place to live."

Fusing an addicting page-turner of a narrative with a potent social commentary, debut author Aisling Rawle elevates a simple reality dating TV show premise into an unforgettable literary achievement. Contestants are subjected to heartbreak and humiliation in the name of entertainment for the unseen audience, which they submit themselves to willingly for the vague promise of a better life—the grand prize is really just more of the same; the winning contestant is allowed to continue to live in the compound for as long as they want, where they are granted all the luxuries they ask for. For Lily, an infinity of mindless consumerism is the only ambition she can dream up. For the reader, it's unsettling to confront the fact that Lily's existence in the compound may not be so different from our own under late-stage capitalism.

Therein lies the strength of The Compound—the expert way in which Rawle conceals dark truths about our present society and human nature under the gossipy veneer of reality TV drama.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in July 2025, and has been updated for the June 2026 edition. Click here to go to this issue.