Discipline by Randa Abdel-Fattah is not interested in offering readers the comfort of distance. Set in Western Sydney during Ramadan in May 2021, against the backdrop of escalating violence in Gaza and rising Islamophobic panic within Australia, the novel follows two Palestinian and Arab-Australian professionals attempting to navigate institutions that publicly celebrate diversity while privately disciplining it.

Agnes is the axis on which the novel turns. She is not written as a passive historical wife but as a force in her own right—rooted in the natural world, attuned to bodies, rhythms, and patterns others overlook. Her form of knowledge is intuitive, physical, almost wordless, which sets her in quiet opposition to the structured, literate world her husband eventually inhabits. This tension between ways of knowing—embodied versus intellectual—runs beneath nearly every scene.

At its heart, Red Rising is less about dramatic uprisings and more about what transformation really costs. Darrow, our protagonist, doesn’t just leap from “downtrodden” to “rebel” in a neat arc. Instead, his path is messy—distorted, disrupted, and deeply uncomfortable. He’s not simply liberated; he’s rebuilt from the ground up. To challenge the system, Darrow needs to get close to its very foundations—physically and mentally. The uneasy tension here? Sometimes, survival deman