The Water Cure

Sophie Mackintosh brings us face to face with the brutality of love, demanding to know the price of survival in a hostile world.

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, & Sky, kept apart from the world for their own good & 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 & insistent, trailing desire & destruction in their wake.

"Extraordinary ... [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 Water Cure isn’t just otherworldly. Doesn’t every dark fantasy expose the parts of real life we’d rather not confront?" — Cal Revely-Calder, The Guardian

°°° 

Sophie Mackintosh is the author of novels The Water Cure & Blue Ticket & her fiction, non-fiction & poetry has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Dazed & the Guardian. In past years she has taught fiction at organisations such as LCF,  The University of Warwick, The Reader Berlin, & Gladstone’s Library, where she was a Writer-In-Residence during February 2019.