The Panopticon

About this book

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Fifteen year old Anais Hendricks is sharp, funny and fiercely self possessed. She is also a child who has learned early how often adults fail to protect those in their care.

In the back of a police car, she is taken towards the Panopticon, a residential home for persistent young offenders, a place shaped by distrust on both sides of its locked doors. Anais does not understand how she has ended up there. Large stretches of the recent past have vanished, and she cannot explain the blood staining her school uniform.

As she tries to piece together what has been lost, Anais must navigate a system that expects the worst of her, and people who are trained not to believe. This is literary crime fiction attentive to voice and power, exploring memory, blame and the cost of being unheard.