This is a 2025 dystopian novel by Laila Lalami. In it the main character, Sara Hussein, is detained in a facility for the rehabilitation of people who have committed no crimes but are predicted by the state to do so in the future. It starts after she has already been detained and her stay has been extended multiple times for the slightest of infractions of a large book of rules.
There are several sections in the book where Sara thinks back on her life. She details the events that led up to her situation, where she was questioned in an airport because her social score, handled by a corporation, was seen as too high. She was rightly frustrated by being forced to wait whilst her husband was arriving with her young twins to pick her up and this appears to not help her case. They also accuse her of lying when she says that her company paid for the travel, when they could see the money coming from her account (she just hadn’t claimed the expenses yet).
It is revealed that when she had the newborn twins she was struggling to sleep. Her husband previously had a neuro-prosthetic installed which allowed him to deal with the situation much more easily. This led her to having the same procedure done. It turns out that the company running the system claims that their small print allows them to monitor all the person’s dreams, and use them to report to the social credit system. She had been having dreams about attacking her husband through frustration, and this is part of what led to her detainment.
Later on we get a section where one of the women who was released without ever having any extensions on her stay turns out to have been a company plant. She was assigned to the residence to investigate the possibility of placing advertising into people’s dreams. She is presented as a reasonably sympathetic character with her own life problems despite the pretty horrific thing she is working on.
The detainees are used to provide labour for various projects that bring in revenue to the company. This is clearly why everyone has their stays arbitrarily extended. In the final sections of the book there is a wildfire near the facility, and it is clear that the company has all but abandoned everyone there. They finally get moved to another one, but are horrifically treated throughout. Sara decides enough is enough and starts a strike. She begins convincing everyone else to join in. Funnily enough, when this starts having an effect on the company line she is quickly released with her stay ended.
I felt that there were far too many “wake up and it was all a dream” segments. Obviously it’s very apt for the story, but it’s a particularly corny device at the best of times. Despite this I enjoyed the book a lot. I found the prose well written, the world believable, and the twist of the company plant genuinely surprising.