The Water Cure: LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018 - Softcover

Mackintosh, Sophie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0241983010 ISBN 13: 9780241983010

Publisher: Penguin, 2019

Synopsis

'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

About this title

Review

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))

Tempest-like... [An] eerie, uncanny literary debut... Beautifully written, pared down [and] hypnotic (Sunday Times Culture)

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)

Compulsive, eerily gorgeous prose, [it] will have you gripped until the end... A film adaptation feels inevitable... As far as debuts go, this is superb (Irish Times)

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')

Eerily beautiful, this strange, unsettling novel creeps up and grabs hold of you (Paula Hawkins, author of 'The Girl on the Train')

[A] wildly confident debut... Take the strange social ceremonies of Yorgos Lanthimos' The Lobster and the pheromone-rich claustrophobia of Sophia Coppola's The Beguiled and you come close to the world Sophie Mackintosh conjures (AnOther Magazine)

Searing, richly drawn, eerily compelling... As foreboding in what it holds back as in what it reveals (Stylist)

Electric [and] beautifully strange... Her novel is an exercise in minimalism (Times Literary Supplement)

From the Back Cover

Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018. 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. Imagine three sisters raised on an island, taught to fear the outside world and its men. And imagine the men who come to find them: three strangers washed up by the sea, bringing desire and destruction in their wake... 'A work of cool, claustrophobic beauty' Eli Goldstone, author of Strange Heart Beating '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 - 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 '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 likea book I'd been waiting to read for a long time' Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Animals

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 0241983010
• ISBN 13: 9780241983010
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256