The Water Cure Paperback by Sophie Mackintosh

Product Details

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton (2019-01-08)
• Language: English
• Paperback: 288 pages
• ISBN-13: 9780735235342
• Item Weight: 368.55 grams
• Dimensions: 8.24 x 5.75 x 0.89 cm

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, WASHINGTON POST, HUFFINGTON POST, VULTURE, LIT HUB, REFINERY29, and more.

"A gripping, sinister fable!" —Margaret Atwood, via Twitter

"Ingenious and incendiary." —The New Yorker

The Handmaid's Tale meets The Virgin Suicides in this dystopic feminist revenge fantasy about three sisters on an isolated island, raised to fear men.

King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters: Grace, Lia, and Sky. He has laid the barbed wire; he has anchored the buoys in the water; he has marked out a clear message: Do not enter. Or, viewed from another angle: Not safe to leave. Here women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cultlike rituals and therapies they endure fortify them against the spreading toxicity of a degrading world.

When their father, the only man they have ever seen, disappears, they retreat further inward until the day two strange men and a boy wash ashore. Over the span of one blisteringly hot week, a psychological cat-and-mouse game plays out. Sexual tensions and sibling rivalries flare as the sisters confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent. Can they survive the men?

A haunting, riveting debut about our capacity for violence and the potency of female desire, The Water Cure both devastates and astonishes as it reflects our own world back at us.

About the Author

SOPHIE MACKINTOSH is the author of Blue Ticket and The Water Cure, which won the 2019 Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize. In 2016 she won the White Review Short Story Prize and the Virago/Stylist short story competition. She has been published in The New York Times, Elle, and Granta, among others.