The Water Cure: LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018

Description

A dreamlike and compulsive feminist dystopia for the #metoo generation You are a girl. Your body is vulnerable. Men will break it if they can - and out there, they absolutely can. Suffering will prepare you for the worst. The cure is nothing compared to what you've been spared in the sickness. It takes a lot of love to hurt you like this. Now, come outside. It's time to play the drowning game.

Sophie Mackintosh is the author of The Water Cure, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018 and won a Betty Trask Award 2019. She has also won the White Review Short Story Prize and the Virago/Stylist Short Story Competition, and has been published in Granta, The White Review and TANK magazine among others. Her second novel, Blue Ticket, comes out in summer 2020.

Compulsive, eerily gorgeous, [it] will have you gripped until the end... A film adaptation feels inevitable... As far as debuts go, this is superb * Irish News * A feminist dystopian fairy tale, a sexual coming-of-age story and a survival-of-the-fittest tale. Evocative, suspenseful and bleak - in short, everything this age seems to be demanding * NPR * [An] eerie, uncanny literary debut... Beautifully written, pared down and hypnotic * Sunday Times Culture * Bewitching... [An] ambiguous utopia * Guardian * 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 * Stunning... A haunting story of abuse, death, and desire... Chilling and topical, a breathtaking debut * Dazed * Eerily beautiful, this strange, unsettling novel creeps up and grabs hold of you -- Paula Hawkins, author of 'The Girl on the Train' Darkly gratifying, dreamy, primal, and arresting [as] a fairy tale... The overgrown grounds, with their perimeter of rusty barbed wire and shark-infested waters, resemble Sleeping Beauty's castle * New Yorker * Searing, richly drawn, eerily compelling... As foreboding in what it holds back as in what it reveals * Stylist * Elemental... [A] utopia portrayed in spectral, organic prose... Mackintosh is a wonderful stylist; the full scope of her imagination, as well as the cohesion of her vision, is evident on every page... A seriously impressive feat * Irish Times * [A] wildly confident debut... Take the strange social ceremonies of The Lobster and the pheromone-rich claustrophobia of The Beguiled and you come close to the world Sophie Mackintosh conjures * AnOther Magazine * The Water Cure is eerily still and pure - with saline bite... Mackintosh asks if it is the traumas of our pasts that ultimately pose the greatest threat to our futures * New Statesman * Powerfully unsettling, immensely assured, calmly devastating. It conjures a world both alien and familiar, exploring the physical and psychological cruelties enacted on women, by men, in the name of their protection, and the noble and ignoble uses to which anger can be put in a perverse world. This is a gem of a novel, and I was bowled over by it -- Katherine Angel, author of 'Unmastered' Electric beautifully strange... Her novel is an exercise in minimalism * Times Literary Supplement * A hypnotic read... This extraordinary debut is a feminist, quasi-dystopian read - great for fans of Hot Milk, The Girls and The Vegetarian * Elle * A work of cool, claustrophobic beauty. Sophie Mackintosh writes devastatingly well about the complexities that women face in loving men, and in loving each other -- Eli Goldstone, author of 'Strange Heart Beating' Uneasy, mythic, lawless... The atmospheric landscapes cloak trauma and violence in wisps of uncertainty, where bad feelings coalesce as both presciently felt and strangely unknowable * Frieze * Otherworldly, brutal and poetic: a feminist fable set by the sea, a utopia gone awry, a female Lord of the Flies. It transported me, savaged me, filled me with hope and fear. It felt like a book I'd been waiting to read for a long time -- Emma Jane Unsworth, author of 'Animals' [A] lyrical debut, original and very atmospheric * Good Housekeeping * Eerie, electric, beautiful. It rushes you through to the end on a tide of tension and closely held panic. I loved this book -- Daisy Johnson, author of 'Fen' Creepy and delightful, a portrayal of post-apocalyptic puberty, intermingling desire and despair. It has a pinch of Shirley Jackson, a dash of chlorine, and an essence all of its own -- Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of 'Harmless Like You' Powerful, mythic, seductively sinister... Her alternative world is as carefully imagined as one of Margaret Atwood's... [Sophie Mackintosh] is a writer to be reckoned with * Book Oxygen * Eerie and unsettling, the novel exerts a hypnotic grip as the tension builds * Daily Mail * A superb debut * i * The Water Cure deserves a Sofia Coppola-style big-screen treatment, although its cultish overtones and sinister denouement are as reminiscent of The Wicker Man as The Virgin Suicides * The Literary Review *