What is a critical exploration and summary of Borderliners by Peter Hoeg?

Borderliners is the English title of a Danish novel by Peter Høeg. The protagonist, Peter, is an orphan who has lived almost his whole life in a series of institutions. After he is placed in Biehl’s Academy, he befriends two other orphans, Katarina and August. In the academy, students are not only tightly scheduled and rigidly controlled, but those who are considered to be misbehaving are both physically and psychologically punished. The three friends realize that they are on the margins of the social class of most other students, or in the “borderliner” category. They fear that they were selected because, as orphans, they have no family who could intervene to remove them from the experiments in which they are required to participate.
As Peter and Katarina grow emotionally closer, they also become protective of August, a deeply troubled boy who became an orphan when he murdered his parents. The school aims to reprogram “damaged” children, using extreme measures to enable them to re-enter society. The young couple resolves to stop the school’s abuses, but first they must understand why and how they are being perpetrated. The youths take initiative to resist the rigid structures by physically and mentally removing themselves from the temporal restrictions even more than escaping physical confinement. Rather than a mystery, the novel is primarily a psychological drama that addresses fundamental questions such as the relationship between human consciousness and the larger concept of time.