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Sophie Mackintosh

The Water Cure: LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 Hardcover – 24 May 2018

by Sophie Mackintosh (Author)

3.6 2,643 ratings

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'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

Shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Breakthrough Award

'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.

'If you're a fan of The Handmaid's Tale you'll love this one' Evening Standard

'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 of The Girl on the Train

'Otherworldly, brutal and poetic: a feminist fable set by the sea, 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

Print length

256 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Hamish Hamilton
Publication date

24 May 2018
Dimensions

14.4 x 2.6 x 22.2 cm
ISBN-10

0241334748
ISBN-13

978-0241334744
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Popular highlights in this book

What are Popular highlights?

Absorbing the guilt and the sorrow is something the world expects of women.
Highlighted by 162 Kindle readers
It will always be a woman who saves us, we know that now. The protections of men are only ever flimsy and self-serving.
Highlighted by 91 Kindle readers
Every time I think I am very lonely, it becomes bleaker and more true. You can think things into being. You can dwell them up from the ground.
Highlighted by 78 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

Product description

Review

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

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 (61 Books to Read This Spring)

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 [and] 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

About the Author

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 Reviewand TANK magazineamong others. Her second novel, Blue Ticket, comes out in summer 2020.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Hamish Hamilton (24 May 2018)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0241334748
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0241334744
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 14.4 x 2.6 x 22.2 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 288,411 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 3,805 in Dystopian
- 3,883 in Fairy Tales (Books)
- 4,058 in Women's Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer reviews:
3.6 2,643 ratings

About the author

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Sophie Mackintosh

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Sophie Mackintosh was born in South Wales in 1988, and is currently based in London. Her fiction, essays and poetry have been published by Granta, The White Review, The New York Times and The Stinging Fly, among others. Her short story ‘Grace’ was the winner of the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize, and her story ‘The Running Ones’ won the Virago/Stylist Short Story competition in 2016.

Sophie’s debut novel The Water Cure was published by Hamish Hamilton in the UK in Spring 2018 and by Doubleday in the US in early 2019 to critical acclaim, and was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

Her second novel Blue Ticket will be published in Spring 2020.

Customer reviews

3.6 out of 5

2,643 global ratings

5 star		26%
4 star		32%
3 star		24%
2 star		11%
1 star		7%

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Astrid

Sensuous & enchanting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 7 February 2023

Verified Purchase

The language is sensuous and the setting enchanting just like the cover image suggests. The ending was a bit rushed though & I felt the finale happened too fast without much buildup. There was a lot of internal monologue that described each character's thoughts & feelings in microscopic detail - that is until the final section of the book. The author seemed to 'slack off' at the end & in a rush to finish off the story - suddenly there was a lot of action without clarifying the psychology behind it. It's such a shame because the author was so good at fleshing out the characters' internal worlds for most of this book.

2 people found this helpful

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Helen

Easy to read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 18 March 2023

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Easy to read, not my regular type of reading . Would have liked a bit stronger ending.

One person found this helpful

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Jane Aland

A languid, feminist fable.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 13 May 2019

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In many ways, the basic scenario of this novel reminded me of 'The Beguiled': an isolated, all-female retreat is invaded by a 'corrupting' male influence, leading to both sexual interaction and an inevitable, bloody dénouement. The setting appears to be some kind of poorly-defined apocalyptic world, though the haziness begins to make sense as we realise that the sisters at the heart of the story are not necessarily reliable narrators, but the results of a very curious upbringing.

Very little occurs in terms of actual plot, and, despite being a short novel, the pace does drag at times, as the three sisters listlessly drag themselves around their refuge, indulging in rituals and mulling over the influence of the men. Ultimately, this is a novel to read for the allusions to sexual politics, though as a feminist fable it does feel a little predictable. There is enough wobble-room that one can read the narrator's views as unreliable, and that they have perhaps been over-sheltered by society from an exaggerated plague of 'toxic masculinity' destroying the outside world, but ultimately it's tough to reach the end of this without feeling like you've been hammered really hard by the 'men - they really suck, huh?' message.

7 people found this helpful

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Michelle M Pitman

Not everything should be easy, sometimes a challenge is good.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 24 March 2021

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This book is going to be marmite for readers. I think there are some harsh reviews out there for this and what I think the mixed reviews show is that this book is a challenge, it's going to be a different read but it is what you make of it, how open-minded you go into it. I agree with the fact that this isn't your classic feminist dystopian book and I think the synopsis is unfair to the actual book, but would also love to remind everyone that every book in that category doesn't have to be like The Handmaids Tale. Feminism can challenge society at any level and in different ways, and not inside the same constructs. It's different and that's what makes this book a solid read.

It 100% deserves its place on the Booker Prize list (Man 2018). The writing is different, what Mackintosh doesn't do is set the wider world scene, and that works brilliantly for this book (but from other reviews is seen as a negative). To explain it would be to take away how this book challenges you. It's dark, unclear and frustrating, and so are the characters. It is set in a controlled environment with little explanation to the outside world, so naturally, the male/female stereotypes that are explored (all men are bad all, women are angelic and naive) are there, but I truly believe it was purposeful and clever. It is easy to hate a book because you don't agree with the point it is making or how it is trying to challenge you, but for me, that's the sign of a good book. This isn't trying to say 'oh no the world is full of bad men and women must not be touched by them' this book is constructing that world and asking questions about it... that for me is a book worth reading. If you are able to have an open mind, give this book a go and remember that not everything should be easy, sometimes a challenge is good.

4 people found this helpful

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Zubs J Malik

Very different to anything I have ever read before

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 6 May 2019

Verified Purchase

I was going to take a few days to really think this book over before I posted this review but then I decided against that notion. It’s always best to get your thoughts written (or typed) down whilst they are still fresh in your mind – so here goes.
It is always easy to brand something as ‘feminist’ and you know automatically that you have grasped the attention of many eager readers. Throw in ‘dystopian’, and the audience widens. But I didn’t see this book as a ‘feminist dystopian’ literature at all. It was so different to anything I have ever read before, in a good way. Yes, the three sisters show unity and courage at the end but before they were seen as ‘heroines’ in my eyes I saw them as the complete opposite.
We follow the lives of three sisters, who live on an island with their parents. Apparently being protected from ‘the man’ who can cause their bodies and health harm BUT that’s where the explanation ended. What they are being protected from and what is out beyond the sea, obviously isn’t quite right, but there isn’t a deep explanation, it was all very vague. Was it purposefully done like this? To gain ‘trust’ from the reader to what may have happened? I would have preferred a little more detail to be honest.
However, the authors style of writing was breathtakingly beautiful. Her writing flows with such fluidity that you almost get lost in her words - A kind of Kafkaesque type of poetic literature. The metaphors to the sea and water are introduced in every chapter and glides with such ease. Beautifully done. The short chapters told from the perspective of each sister was a great way to understand the characters personally.
Very different to anything I have read before. But change is good. 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Zubs 💛💋

17 people found this helpful

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Laura

Gripping and well written

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 11 April 2023

Verified Purchase

Well written - I couldn't put this down.
It has a surreal quality, and the author effectively creates a developing sense of dread.

One person found this helpful

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regodibay

Many detailed descriptions of characters being mildly annoyed by other characters

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on 15 March 2023

Verified Purchase

This book is about three innocent(?) girls and their creepy mother inexplicably killing time at a spa hotel after a chemical apocalypse.

When I started to fret about whether or not they were putting chlorine in the hotel pool water, I realized that this was yet another a Booker prize long-list book that was not for me. 🙂

One person found this helpful

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The Water Cure: LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 Hardcover – 24 May 2018

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