Discover the breakout literary debut of 2018 – the essential read for fans of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Deborah Levy’s Hot Milk and Emma Cline’s The Girls!

‘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

Sophie Mackintosh’s debut novel, The Water Cure, which was was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, is out now from Penguin Random House.

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.

Once upon a time, damaged women came here to be cured. We took them in, fed them glasses of our clean, good water, let them scream at the waves till their lips split like ripe fruit.

Now no one is left but my sisters and me. King died a year ago, quite suddenly. Mother has vanished, no one knows where. And the safe compound they built around us, far away from the toxic world, has finally been breached.

Three men arrived last week, washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent. We remember now what our father taught us. ‘If the men come to you, show yourself some mercy. Don’t stick around and wait for them to put you out of your misery.’

 

Categories Fiction International

Tags New books New releases Penguin Random House SA Sophie Mackintosh The Water Cure