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Once upon a time, damaged women came here to be cured. We took them in, fed them glasses of our clean, good water, let them scream at the waves till their lips split like ripe fruit. Now no one is left but my sisters and me. King died a year ago, quite suddenly. Mother has vanished, no one knows where. Three men arrived last week, washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent...

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THE LITERARY DEBUT OF THE SUMMER 2018

´A gripping, sinister fable´ - MARGARET ATWOOD, via Twitter

´An extraordinary debut novel. Otherworldly, luminous, precise... She is writing the way that Sofia Coppola would shoot the end of the world´ Guardian

´Bold, inventive, haunting... With shades of Margaret Atwood and Eimear McBride, you´ll be bowled over by it´ Stylist

´Visceral, hypnotic... with one of my favourite endings I´ve read in a long while´ The Pool

Imagine a world very close to our own: where women are not safe in their bodies, where desperate measures are required to raise a daughter. This is the story of Grace, Lia and Sky, kept apart from the world for their own good and taught the terrible things that every woman must learn about love. And it is the story of the men who come to find them - three strangers washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent, trailing desire and destruction in their wake.

The Water Cure is a fever dream, a blazing vision of suffering, sisterhood and transformation.

´Immensely assured, calmly devastating´ Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered

´A work of cool, claustrophobic beauty´ Eli Goldstone, author of Strange Heart Beating

´Eerily beautiful, strange [and] unsettling´ Paula Hawkins, author ofThe Girl on the Train

´Otherworldly, brutal and poetic: a feminist fable set by the sea, a female Lord of the Flies. It felt like a book I´d been waiting to read for a long time´ Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Animals

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In raw, visceral prose, Mackintosh probes at ideas of the threat of male violence, the ways women are told to protect ourselves, love and sisterhood and survival. A hypnotic, stormy book, with one of my favourite endings I´ve read in a long while The Pool

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Mackintosh, Sophie
Sophie Mackintosh is the author of The Water Cure, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018. She also won the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize and the 2016 Virago/Stylist Short Story competition, and has been published in Granta and TANK magazine among others. She is now working on her second novel, Blue Ticket, which will be published by Hamish Hamilton in Spring 2020.

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