Aisling Rawle

Aisling Rawle was born in 1998 and grew up in County Leitrim, in the west of Ireland, one of the most rural and least populated parts of the country. She now lives in Dublin. Until 2025 she had no published book.

The Compound came out in July 2025 from The Borough Press, a HarperCollins imprint in the UK, and reached the US through a Penguin Random House publisher. It was launched as a debut and billed as dystopian fiction.

The setup is easy to pitch. Lily joins a reality show filmed in a sealed house in the middle of the desert. Tasks earn food, clothes and small luxuries, and every week someone goes home. The rest the book lets the reader piece together slowly.

Anyone who watches reality TV will spot the format right away: confinement, challenges, alliances, eliminations. Rawle uses that familiar frame to get at desire, consumption and how much people will give up to stay in the game.

The book won the 2025 Goodreads Choice Award for Science Fiction, a category decided by reader votes. For a first-time author, sharing that year's winners list with names like Suzanne Collins, Emily Henry and V. E. Schwab turned heads. It is her first book and, so far, her only one.