num_pages: 336
description: Anais Hendricks fifteen is in the back of a police car. She is headed for the Panopticon a home for chronic young offenders. She can't remember whats happened but across town a policewoman lies in a coma and Anaiss school uniform is covered in blood.Raised in foster care from birth and moved through twenty-three placements before she even turned seven Anais has been let down by just about every adult she has ever met. Now a counter-culture outlaw she knows that she can only rely on herself. And yet despite the parade of horrors visited upon her early life she greets the world with the witty fierce insight of a survivor.Anais finds a sense of belonging among the residents of the Panopticon  they form intense bonds and she soon becomes part of an ad hoc family. Together they struggle against the adults that keep them confined. When she looks up at the watchtower that looms over the residents though Anais knows her fate: she is an anonymous part of an experiment and she always was. Now it seems that the experiment is closing in.Named one of the best books of the year by the Times Literary Supplement and the Scotsman The Panopticon is an astonishingly haunting remarkable debut novel. In language dazzling energetic and pure it introduces us to a heartbreaking young heroine and an incredibly assured and outstanding new voice in fiction.
language: English
title: The Panopticon
publisher: William Heinemann Ltd