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|title=The Panopticon

|sort=Panopticon, The

|publisher=Windmill Books

|date=April 2013

|summary=A weird, gorgeous, utterly unplaceable work of fiction that’s hilarious, uplifting, dirty and real, ''The Panopticon'' is the world as seen through the eyes of teenage delinquent Anais Hendricks.

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Imagine reading a book set in a Scottish children’s care home. It’s about a violent and a deeply disturbed fifteen year old drug addict who, when she was eleven, found her prostitute foster mother murdered in the bathtub. That’s the set-up of Jenni Fagan’s ''The Panopticon'', and that’s what it’s about – but the funny thing is that whatever you’re picturing in your head right now, and what I was imagining before I sat down to read it, bears absolutely no resemblance to the book Fagan has actually written.

On the strength of this book, Fagan more than deserves her place on the recent Granta list of young British novelists. She’s a major talent whose work should be widely recognised. ''The Panopticon'' is a weird, gorgeous, utterly unplaceable work of fiction that’s hilarious, uplifting, dirty and real. I fell in love with it from the first page and then struggled for weeks to put my feelings about it into words. This review is so much less than it should be. You’ll just have to read the book for yourself to find out what I'm talking about.

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