A fascinating premise here:  In a near-future America even more terrible than our current right-wing dystopia, everything about your life contributes to your risk score, including your dreams which are recorded and monitored by the government's Risk Assessment Administration. If your risk score rises above a threshold, you're sent to a retention facility, even if you've not actually committed a crime or done anything at all wrong. It's like a much more realistic version of the Tom Cruise vehicle Minority Report. 

Sara is our protagonist here, a normal LA woman whose risk score suddenly breaches the 500 threshold because she and her husband, parents of newborn twins, are stuck in a rough patch. So she's detained at LAX after a work trip because the RAA thinks she might try to kill him, based on some dreams. She's whisked off to a "retention facility" where she's told she has to "calm down" for 21 days...but of course that turns out to be much longer. 

Through Sara's harrowing story, Lalami examines:
--the horrific evil of for-profit prisons and mass incarceration
--the loss of privacy and how personal data is bought and sold to be used for nefarious purposes
--the loss of dignity under the cover of security and capitalism
--how climate change will continue to wreak havoc on everyday life
--the loss of civility and basic human consideration when everyone is just out for themselves (EFF YOU, AYN RAND) 

Like any good dystopian novel, this one is made so much more chilling because it's not hard to imagine this "world" at all. We're well on our way there.