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´A gripping, sinister fable´ Margaret Atwood (via Twitter)

´An extraordinary debut - otherworldly, luminous, precise´ Guardian

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

Grace, Lia and Sky live in an abandoned hotel, on a sun-bleached island, beside a poisoned sea. Their parents raised them there to keep them safe, to make them good. The world beyond the water is contaminated and men are the contamination. But one day three strangers wash ashore - men who stare at the sisters hungrily, helplessly. Men who bring trouble.

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

´An unsettling dark fantasy... [It] lingers long after the final page´ Daily Telegraph

´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

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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. Her second novel, Blue Ticket, which will be published by Hamish Hamilton in Spring 2020.

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