The Midlist Revisited: The Compound by Aisling Rawle

A Dazzling Debut Dystopian Novel for Our Moment

What it Takes to Get on the Midlist

A few months ago, we talked about “the midlist,” how it is unfairly associated with “mid” quality, when the actual definition is books that are successful economically but not blockbuster bestsellers. Really, the midlist is the lifeblood of publishing and where a lot of the most interesting but accessible literature can be found. As such, Dear Head of Mine is experimenting with a little rebrand, instead of the EABC (Editorial Assistant Book Club), we’re going to start focusing more on The Midlist, turning our attention away from runaway bestsellers like Intermezzo, Real Americans, and Fourth Wing, and toward moderately popular, but great new contemporary books like The Compound by Aisling Rawle.

At 9,700 hardcovers sold as of this writing, The Compound— published June 24, 2025 —squeaks by on our definition of “midlist” (5,000-10,000 hardcovers). This does not even come close to breaking through to the next level in fiction these days, where a spot on the bestseller list requires 6,000 hardcovers sold…in one week. The high bar for making the bestseller list is good for book publishing generally—sales are strong, people are reading—but digging below the surface reveals a greater widening of haves and have nots. The vast majority of the recent fiction bestseller list is made up of established brand authors (Stephen King, James Patterson, Fredrik Backman, Taylor Jenkins Reid) and Romantasy, selling in numbers every week what most midlist books sell over their entire lifespan.

What does an author need in this top-heavy fiction environment to achieve midlist status as a debut or non-name brand novelist? A national book club pick, for one. In the case of The Compound that means the Good Morning America book club, widely considered the least influential on sales of the big four book clubs (Oprah, Reese Witherspoon, Jenna Bush Hager, and GMA). Plus, all the normal attendant coverage for splashy debuts (New York Times, Oprah, Vulture, NPR, etc.) and massive early outreach (16,000 ratings and 4,000 reviews on Goodreads). For a debut novelist to even crack the midlist, this is what it takes these days.

A Literary Novel in Sheep’s Clothing

The Compound is deservingly and accurately described by one reviewer as “Love Island meets Lord of the Flies,” which might deceive some readers regarding what type of novel they are about to read. There’s a version of a dystopian reality TV show novel that is fun and frivolous with the kind of food for thought that has come into vogue of applying a high magnifying lens to low culture. Something that uses the setup of a game show as a fun backdrop for murder and mayhem, while satirizing and roasting the reality tv show archetypes we are all vaguely familiar with (influencers and fuck boys). The Compound, however, is not that kind of reality TV thriller—it’s much more.

The Compound’s good but not superlative reader rating (3.7 stars) is in fact exactly what you would expect when a book’s commercial promise doesn’t exactly mesh with how it’s executed on the page. The novel’s style diverges greatly from what you’d expect from something chosen by a national morning show for its book club. Rawle does not write in what has become sort of a house style for major bestselling fiction in recent years—a pacey, direct action, dialogue heavy, frictionless kind of prose. The Compound is a literary novel in the sense that it is heavily interior and told entirely in first person. If you read enough dystopian, speculative, or science fiction novels, this style will feel familiar. There’s a remove, an almost behind-glass disconnect in the narration. For a novel ostensibly about the cutthroat nature of human interaction, dialogue is kept sparse and quite cursory at times. Such that this reality tv novel is closer to Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go than Jessica Knoll’s The Favorite Sister. Here’s a passage from the middle of the novel as an example:

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. I couldn't stomach the thought of waking every morning and hating it, all of it: the flavorless brown cereal that was supposedly good for gut health, the coffee that hadn't had time to cool, the walk to work, that stupid hill that I hated—-the feeling in my thighs just before I got to the summit, and knowing that I'd make the same walk the next day over and over. And the standing around, day after day, waiting for something to do and then resenting being given work to do. The chitchat, the mold on the wall of the breakroom, the hole in the ceiling above the staff toilet, the insects that gathered there, and then the commercial sheen of the display counters. Going home and dreading doing it again the next day, and still never having enough money.

In keeping with the most important trend of 21^st century fiction The Compound is a deceptively genre-bending novel. It combines a literary sensibility with a light speculative, science fiction sheen and a good dose of thriller mechanics. It makes sense, given these dark times and continuing trends toward genre fluidity, that a novel about contemporary life resembles something closer to Lord of the Flies than Philip Roth.

Two good covers for a novel that’s difficult to capture visually

Apex Game Plot

Games, as we’ve discussed before, represent an excellent structure for a novel. These defined parameters give a writer a helpful set of rules to keep tension high as we march from competition to outcome. They tap into something a good deal of people can’t resist. Board games, card games, video games, anything with a set of rules and a competitive objective, appeal to us with their blend of random chance and element of skill, having us return to a predictable ritual with an unpredictable result. The word “hardwired” feels appropriate to describe the locked-in nature that a great game can inspire, a sense that the whole world narrows and completing the next task, although ultimately arbitrary, becomes of utmost importance. This is the primal impulse that The Compound foremost taps into.

The gameplay of The Compound is modeled after Love Island, a reality show started in the UK (Rawle is Irish) where contestants are carted off to a remote mansion in Mallorca (or Fiji in the US version), filmed 24/7, and must “couple up” and prove the strength of their relationship to stay on the show. A winning couple is crowned (mostly by public vote) in the end and one person who is the best liked has to choose whether to split the grand prize or keep it for themselves. Rawle’s twist on this formula is that there are a finite number of contestants getting eliminated and the contestants rather than the viewers decide who to banish (mostly, no spoilers). In Rawle’s world, the beautiful mansion sits in the middle of a barren desert that contestants get exiled to when they are eliminated. And finally, the light-hearted, silly competitions and tasks done on Love Island for viewer’s amusement are completed in The Compound for essential survival goods like food and soap. A running theme that sets the tone in The Compound is that they don’t have a front door to the house when they first arrive and they fear dangerous wild animals walking right into the house.

The result of Rawle’s vision of a dystopian version of this reality game show is that this stylistically literary, interior books also manages to be one of the most compulsively readable, “I need to find out what happens next” novels of the year. Rawle has kept the structure open enough to allow herself freedom with timing— there’s no set pace at which the contestants have to be eliminated— but constricts her rules smartly throughout to keep the reader hooked. As just one example, when the men first arrive to the compound from a trek through the desert, setting the stage with a quite sinister tone in and of itself, they are short one man. But in the rules of the game each player must be “coupled up” so we know that by next morning one of the girls must be eliminated (turn the pages to find out who and why). The reader feels compelled to know who survives and who is cut next, but the variations Rawle finds to do this is a masterclass of a game plot.

Apocalypse Now

The Compound checks all the boxes of what makes a literary book, stylistic, structural, and most importantly thematic. If The Compound didn’t have much to say beyond a stellar plot it would be a really good, entertaining thriller, but it’s Rawle’s keen literary sensibilities that make it a great novel.

As temperatures hit record highs, one of the highest magnitude earthquakes strikes, and major humanitarian crises and wars unfold across the world, it is hard to address the existential moment we’re living through in fiction. Technically, The Compound probably rests in the “near future” category of novel, there’s a certain technological bent to how the logistics work in the fictional show. There are also many strong suggestions of a world in steep, apocalyptic decline (see example above and also the book’s cover image) that give the narrative a speculative feel. But like any good speculative, near-future novel, the world Rawle imagines feels pretty damn real, one that we aren’t that far off from inhabiting, if we don’t already.

The interiority, ennui, and lethargic dread our narrator Lily captures is about as spot-on an encapsulation of the Gen Z and younger Millennial sense of impending doom as any recent literary novel. The themes in The Compound aren’t too complex to decode, but like a lot of good fiction in the speculative genre, Rawle doesn’t have to hit readers over the head with opinions to make them think by unraveling her vision of our possible future.

Rawle seems to understand that shows like Love Island are already a dystopian without any fictionalization. The core irony of reality TV, of which viewers have only become more and more aware, is that while they are often portrayed as a glamorous escapes from reality, the conditions of these shows for participants is actually an artificial hell of sorts. A hell that breaks people psychologically because we are not meant to live in a gamified, extremely static environment, aware that every private and intimate moment we have is being filmed and observed by millions of other humans.

What makes the novel work and not become an over-the-top techno dystopia or reality tv satire is the author’s genuine confrontation of loving to watch these shows while recognizing the dark heart at their center for both participant and viewer. Like many literate people these days Rawle is a fan of Love Island. Her “meticulous research” for the novel consisted of “binge-watching Love Island over lockdown.” This makes sense: it wouldn’t be possible for her to utilize the gamification of the show in such a brilliant way if she didn’t understand its dynamics intimately. She wouldn’t get at the heart of the tropes and social dynamics so cuttingly if she weren’t immersed in these worlds. And yet, The Compound is a sparkling achievement because the tension that’s not so subtlety on display is that a good number of educated people—Rawle very much implicating herself—know they are consuming junk food. The true dystopian reality of The Compound is not just the artificial hell for the contestants, it’s that the viewers, who Lily is a stand-in for, themselves likely enjoy TikTok, reality TV, or just the endless scroll, know what they are participating in is a morbid numbing agent. That while they may have the political, economic, and intellectual capital to act and change what is going on, they’d rather keep their eyes on the villa than attend to the world burning all around them.

The Compound may be a midlist standout for now, but I don’t expect this to last long. In a rare instance, sales of the novel actually went up in its 5^th week on sale. That’s because while a literary reader might balk at a “reality TV” novel and a reality TV lover might say “I thought this was going to be fun”, this novel came to me by way of several enthusiastic recommendations from several different types of readers. Like or dislike how the novel is executed or how it ends, it is undeniably impossible to put down or not talk about once you finish.