Author(s): Sophie Mackintosh

MBP 2018

THE LITERARY DEBUT OF THE SUMMER 2018

'An extraordinary debut novel. Otherworldly, luminous, precise... She is writing the way that Sofia Coppola would shoot the end of the world' Guardian

'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