“The men,” thinks Lia, “do not live lightly on our territory.” Like her sisters, Lia is afraid, remembering King’s warning that men can “break your arm without thinking”, but fear is electric, too, and she is prey to her own desires. James and Llew, the elder pair, lay claim to the house, then start to reach for the women’s bodies. Mother ineffectually pulls her girls away, tries to frighten the visitors, but before long, the old King Lear setup – a patriarch’s sole claim on filial love – is going sideways. One day, three men wash up on their beach: two adults, one boy. In The Water Cure everything is luminous, precise, slow to the point of dread The ritual sparks an electric charge between sisters, down pathways drawn by King.His legacy is the real toxin: a trauma that forces its victims to go on playing it out. One morning she orders a “love therapy” on the beach, in which Lia, on Sky’s behalf, is forced to kill a mouse and then a toad. Now, in his afterglow, Mother is a surviving queen consort. They are sewn into “fainting sacks” and “drowning dresses” they keep muslin pressed to their mouths like masks. The title of Sophie Mackintosh’s extraordinary debut novel, The Water Cure, refers to one of the many immunising cruelties King has devised for the girls.

To understand what toxins are, and indeed for their knowledge of everything else, the girls have always deferred to King. Outside, beyond the sea and the horizon, there is a “toxin‑filled world”. Inside live three girls, Grace, Lia and Sky, with their parents Mother and King. Their safe compound, far away from the toxic world, has finally been breached as three men arrive washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent.Īngela Carter for the twenty-first century - an exquisitely crafted feminist fable about suffering, sisterhood and transformation.T here is a house on an island, alone by the sea. This is the story of The Water Cure where girls Grace, Lia and Sky are kept apart from the world for their own good and taught the terrible things that every woman must learn about love. 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. Her short story Grace was the winner of the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize, and her story The Running Ones won the Virago/Stylist Short Story competition in 2016. Sophie Mackintosh’s fiction and poetry has been published in Granta Magazine, The White Review and TANK Magazine, amongst others. Dreamlike and compulsive debut about love, violence and survival at any cost.

Sophie mackintosh books