The Water Cure
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018
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3.6 • 28 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE
A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, WASHINGTON POST, HUFFINGTON POST, VULTURE, LIT HUB, REFINERY29, and more.
"A gripping, sinister fable!" —Margaret Atwood, via Twitter
"Ingenious and incendiary." —The New Yorker
The Handmaid's Tale meets The Virgin Suicides in this dystopic feminist revenge fantasy about three sisters on an isolated island, raised to fear men.
King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters: Grace, Lia, and Sky. He has laid the barbed wire; he has anchored the buoys in the water; he has marked out a clear message: Do not enter. Or, viewed from another angle: Not safe to leave. Here women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cultlike rituals and therapies they endure fortify them against the spreading toxicity of a degrading world.
When their father, the only man they have ever seen, disappears, they retreat further inward until the day two strange men and a boy wash ashore. Over the span of one blisteringly hot week, a psychological cat-and-mouse game plays out. Sexual tensions and sibling rivalries flare as the sisters confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent. Can they survive the men?
A haunting, riveting debut about our capacity for violence and the potency of female desire, The Water Cure both devastates and astonishes as it reflects our own world back at us.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
For the three sisters sequestered on a mysterious island in The Water Cure, nothing is as it seems. Raised by parents who continually warn them of the threats lurking in the world “outside”—toxins, beasts, and most dangerous of all, men—Lia, Grace, and Sky stick close to home. But then, tragedy and male interlopers throw their carefully constructed reality into chaos. Debut novelist Sophie Mackintosh builds a fiercely tense and unsettling story with spare, airy prose and cleverly deployed real-world insights. If you’re yearning for a new twist on The Handmaid’s Tale, pick this up.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mackintosh's intense, ambitious debut, longlisted for the Man Booker, evokes a feminist dystopia where three sisters live in isolation meant to protect them from a toxic world that has become particularly dangerous for women. At an unspecified time in the future, global warming and pollution have poisoned the planet, making men more violent and women vulnerable. One couple, King and Mother, choose to raise their three daughters surrounded by sea and barbwire; their only visitors are women seeking therapies like the water cure (near-drowning to fortify against toxins and fear). Mother teaches her daughters caustic 20-something Grace, touch-hungry teenage Lia, and their youngest, Sky to suppress emotions, love only each other, and prepare for the worst. Then King disappears, and two men and a boy wash ashore. Mother shows her daughters how to use a pistol before she too disappears. Grace, Lia, and Sky are left to fend for themselves as the men grow impatient, proprietary, and threatening. The sisters' impressionistic narratives, presented solo and in chorus, show Lia's self-mutilation in close-up while the world disorder is described indirectly through its aftereffects. Mackintosh's gripping novel is vicious in its depiction of victimhood, vibrant when victims transform into warriors, and full of outrage at patriarchal power, environmental devastation, and the dehumanization of women.
