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Jenni Fagan's debut novel arrives announcing a voice so fully formed it almost seems implausible as a first book. The Panopticon drops us into the back of a police car beside Anais Hendricks, fifteen years old, her school uniform stained with blood she cannot account for, a policewoman lying in a coma, and a rap sheet long enough to suggest she probably did it. She is en route to the institution of the title, a circular observation unit for chronic young offenders - one more stop in a life that has already taken her through dozens of placements since birth.

What stops this from being the grim, miserabilist slog the synopsis threatens is Fagan's astonishing command of voice. Anais narrates in heavy Scottish dialect, all didnaes and wisnaes, and the rhythm of her thinking - darting between bitter wit, philosophical aside, drug-fogged reverie and surprisingly tender observation - is the novel's real engine. She is a school dropout who reads Foucault, a violent offender with a meticulous moral code, a girl in sailor shorts and a pillbox hat convinced she is the subject of a sinister experiment conducted by faceless men in wide-brimmed hats. The paranoia might be the drugs talking. It might not. The novel is slippery enough that the ambiguity feels like the point.

The surveillance metaphor is worked hard but rarely feels schematic. Anais understands instinctively what the adults around her refuse to name: that the care system is less interested in saving her than in watching her fail on schedule. The statistical destinations laid out for girls like her - prison, prostitution, early death - hover over every scene. Against this, Fagan offers the fierce, improvised family Anais builds with the other residents, and it is in these friendships that the book earns its surprising tenderness. The humour is filthy, the loyalty absolute, and the gallows comedy between these kids is consistently funnier than it has any right to be.

Not everything lands. There are stretches where the unrelieved catalogue of abuse, addiction and institutional cruelty tips into something that can feel performative, a competition in bleakness that some will find exhausting rather than illuminating. The magical realist flourishes - moving stone lions, the watchtower's shifting occupants - occasionally strain against the ferocious realism of the rest, though for most readers they deepen rather than dilute the atmosphere. The ending, a cautious grasp at hope, risks feeling like wish fulfilment, and only just survives the charge on the strength of the bond between the characters by that point.

Still, the cumulative effect is formidable. This is a book with a conscience that never slips into sermon, written by someone who clearly knows the territory from the inside and refuses to flatten its inhabitants into case studies. Anais Hendricks joins the small company of genuinely unforgettable fictional narrators, and The Panopticon announces Fagan as a serious, singular talent. A difficult book, but a necessary one - and, against every expectation the premise sets up, frequently a joyful one too.