"A gripping, sinister fable!" --Margaret Atwood, via Twitter King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. Here on his island, women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world.
But when King disappears and two men and a boy wash ashore, the sisters' safe world begins to unravel. Over the span of one blistering hot week, a psychological cat-and-mouse game plays out. Sexual tensions and sibling rivalries flare as the sisters are forced to confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent.
A haunting, riveting debut,
The Water Cure is a fiercely poetic feminist revenge fantasy that's a startling reflection of our time.
"Chilling. . . . Unsettling. . . . Feels both futuristic and like an eerily familiar fable."
--The New York Times
"Remarkable. . . . Mackintosh seamlessly weaves together the themes of Shakespeare . . . with the very modern issue of toxic masculinity."
--The Washington Post "Sensational. . . . Part fable, part feminist dystopia, Mackintosh's taut novel turns a keen, unsparing eye on violence, patriarchy, and desire."
--Esquire
"Mackintosh's novel follows in the footsteps of
The Handmaid's Tale . . . but this debut has its own alluring style."
--Vogue
"Ingenious and incendiary."
--Laura Miller, The New Yorker
"A tart, uncanny debut novel."--NPR "Haunting. . . . Sumptuous."
--The New York Times Book Review
"Gorgeously dark, disturbing, and provocative."
--San Francisco Chronicle
"Eerie and quietly stunning."
--Bomb
"Creepy and sexy in equal measure."
--The Independent
"An evocative coming-of-age novel."
--Kirkus Reviews
"[An] intense, ambitious debut."
--Publishers Weekly
"An extraordinary otherworldly debut. . . . [Mackintosh] is writing the way that Sofia Coppola would shoot the end of the world: everything is luminous, precise, slow to the point of dread."
--The Guardian
"A haunting, disturbing look into the ways in which young women are failed by those closest to them, and how those failures echo outward, poisoning all of existence."
--Nylon
"There's something Joni Mitchell-esque about the lyrical, emotional tone of the prose. . . . Mackintosh's profound faith in sisterhood imbues her particular dark vision with beauty and a kind of hope."
--Newsday "A feminist dystopian fairy tale--evocative, suspenseful, and bleak--in short, everything this age seems to be demanding."
--Fresh Air
"Demonstrate[s] why the subtlest fiction is often the most powerful."
--Vulture "This riveting debut adds another dimension to a post-
Handmaid's Tale world."
--The Telegraph
"Startling. . . . Mackintosh is a wonderful stylist; the full scope of her imagination, as well as the cohesion of her vision, is evident on every page."
--The Irish Times
"A hypnotic read. . . . This extraordinary debut is a feminist quasi-dystopian read for fans of
Hot Milk, The Girls, and
The Vegetarian."
--Elle (UK)
