Really entertaining, watching people make alliances, and fight amongst themselves, to be one of the final five in this take on reality TV.
A mixed bag of characters that are certainly going to rub each other up the wrong way.
It's slightly sinister anyway, plotting to evict people, but it only gets more so as the days go on.
By the end, we're all a little bit crazy, and I for one am left wondering,would it even be worth it?

This book absolutely hits that sweet spot of being a sinister page-turner while also offering up a critique of late stage capitalism with rampant consumerism and spiritual ennui as a replacement for meaning. The premise is the ultimate reality TV show set in the compound in the middle of a desert ringed with wildfires. The contestants have to pair up in heterosexual, almost totally white couples in order not to be banished, while accumulating rewards that get increasingly expensive (diamond earrings, cashmere, watches, designer clothes and make-up etc.).

Rawle manages to get so much social commentary in here: the lack of make-up and hair products for the single Black woman, the commodification and objectification of bodies (everyone is beautiful, natch!), the divided gender roles where the women do most of the domestic stuff around cooking and cleaning while the men mostly supervise and deal with construction and repairs. There is war in the background and submerged violence, sexual tensions as the women couple up, even if only strategically, while the men spread their, er, 'favours'. And a big driver is consumerism and consumption: they can accumulate more and more expensive stuff the longer they stay in, culminating in a kind of free-fall of goods at the late stage.

But, underneath it all, is also Lily's search for meaning - an escape from her dead-end shop job that she thinks will be overwritten by all the opportunities offered by the compound - only, the more she survives and accumulates the less satisfied she is.

What makes this such a good read is that it has all the gossipy fun of reality TV shows like Love Island without ignoring the deeper, darker, aspects of their cultural positioning and the deadening effect on human consciousness. In lots of ways this is a bleak book, despondent about human nature and what we are prepared to do and be for the sake of consumerist/capitalist success but it wraps up that despair in something that is bright and riveting as a read.