Imagine a world where you can be detained at His Majesty’s Pleasure for thinking about committing a crime. A world where complicated algorithms can sift through your life history, and a million observations of your behaviour, and determine that – for the safety of society – you would be better locked up.

That’s what happens in this book and Sara, a 38-year-old mother, finds herself detained at Customs in the United States and sent to Madison, a converted old school building in the middle of nowhere. To leave, she has to prove that she doesn’t think like that but the annoyances and irritations of detention don’t help and a device that reads her dreams tells the authorities exactly what is going on.

Her family and friends think that if she only followed the rules for a week or two she would be allowed out but the rules are Kafkaesque and it is not that easy for the women detained there.

She has a lawyer and occasional visits but the routine and the processes means that there are many cancellations as if the system is conspiring against her. She suspects that one of the guards is making life difficult for her as well but society doesn’t care. Potential murderers should obviously be locked up!

This is a dystopian novel but many of the elements clearly reflect the challenge of imprisonment in the modern world and its flaws. There are also people in the UK indefinitely imprisoned, like Sara, until they can somehow demonstrate that they have reformed. Worse still, the UK Ministry of Justice has what is called a ‘homicide prediction project’ being quietly developed which uses ethnicity, social class, crime data and social services data to predict those most likely to commit serious crimes. Of course, it is only in the research stage and there is nothing to worry about… …that is unless you’re on it!

It’s a good read. The strains on Sara’s family life are well-documented and there’s something about the people who might invent this kind of thing. The other detainees are an interesting bunch and the minutiae of being locked up for a long time is well explored.

And, now it turns out that it isn’t just dystopian but also slightly predictive about the world we could live in!