On a small island, three daughters come to terms with the death of their father, known as The King, and the future where none of them – including their mother – can go to the mainland for supplies in case they become infected.
In this dystopian future, disease is everywhere and men are the carriers. It is all the three girls – Lia, Grace and Sky – know and it means when two men and a boy wash up on the beach by their home they are full of fear, but also – for one of them – wonder.
To say the three are unhappy doesn’t really describe their situation. They have known nothing else. But they are unsatisfied. Their life is a series of rituals to keep the sickness at bay and, as an outsider, it is strange to read and harder still to understand because Mackintosh doesn’t tell you what went before, how Lia, Grace and Sky ended up living in this remote place, and what they really remember of their life before.
What you do see is a mother and farther who are either mad or evil or maybe a bit of both, making the book an uncomfortable read at times. In fact, quite a lot of it the story made me uncomfortable, the way men are portrayed, for example, though I think this is very much in line with the genre, because they are so two-dimensional, but – more than that – the way the women treat each other in ways that borders on cruel. There is no idea of female solidarity, no idea of making a better world, not until the very end.
Because of this, I am left in two minds about the book. I liked a lot about it – the way Mackintosh writes is otherworldly and perfectly suited to this other world I found myself in. The picture she paints at the beginning of the book is stark and startling and I liked that. I also liked that, as the story unfolds, so much is not how it seems.
What I didn’t like is that, in so many ways, the story didn’t go anywhere. I wanted a ‘moment’, something that would leave me shocked, or stunned, or left with deep thoughts that rattled round my head for weeks, the effect I get when I read a book by Margaret Atwood say. And I didn’t get that. It’s probably unfair to compare the two authors and I’m trying not to but this book had shades of the Handmaid’s Tale and I couldn’t help myself. Which leaves me liking, but not loving the book.

Grace, Lia and Sky are on an island with their mother. Their father, referred to as King, has gone missing. The girls have been raised to believe that men are dangerous, and toxic to women, except King, who has renounced the ways of other men. To stay safe within the boundaries that have been created by King, the girls must undertake certain rituals, which are often cruel. When 2 men and a boy are washed ashore soon after King’s disappearance, it challenges what the girls know about love and possession, and the world that King, and their mother, has created around them.

The writing in the Water Cure is beautifully hypnotic and ethereal. I really feel that the cover art captures it so well - there is a glimpse of something on the surface, but there is much we can’t see, and which is hinted at. And in this book there are many things that are hinted at and never outrightly said. It is left to the reader to join the dots.

Though the story is often dark and cruel, there are also gentle flashes of humour which bring the novel into the present. A request for water responded to with an outstretched arm to the sea, ‘Knock yourself out.’ The girls must meditate on a word. ‘What’s the word?’ requests Lia. ‘Tramadol.’

This book reminded me of Census by Jesse Ball in that it requires a certain effort on the part of the reader. We need to imagine this world we are transported to, we need to suspend our disbelief, and imagine the answers to our unanswered questions; Where are we? When? What has happened to the world?
And I think readers who put in that effort will find that Lia, Sky and Grace stay in your mind long after the book is closed.

I've heard a lot about this book so was very keen to read it. However, I was disappointed.

The narrative feels too familiar in a current book market saturated by dystopian feminist literature. Mackintosh's book revisits themes of reproduction, women's bodies and male control that have been explored many times before.

I liked the style of writing and format of the prose. The mother was a really interesting character and the nuances of the relationship between the sisters were elegantly explored.

Unfortunately, the book felt slow and laboured to me and was unable to sustain my interest.

A sumptuous, claustrophobic, hallucinogenic read. Incredibly intense, it felt alot like Emma Cline's The Girls (which I loved) in tone. Mackintosh's use of language is powerful and lyrical, I was very pleasantly surprised thast she managed to sustain the tone for the full book. Not many writers would be able to do this.

Whilst I admired the general lack of backstory and explanation, there was perhaps room for a little more of it. I think I would have been rather lost if I had not read up on some reviews and blurbs before reading.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed losing myself in this lush and hypnotic world and I will be keeping a lookout for whatever Sophie Mackintosh writes next.

*3.5 stars

I received an earc of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

What I found negative about this book is that it seems to market itself as a feminist book about what happens if men constantly hurt women - but that premise has been done a million times before. Whilst the writing was enticing, and enjoyable, and the characters were interesting and likeable, the weird, mysterious nature of the writing style was something that didn't altogether work for me.

The bond of sisterhood, which is definitely a main theme, was one of the reasons this book got more than a one/two star rating.

Also, I would not call this a feminist book. Sure, it touches on feminist themes, like the nature of a patriarchal society, but the world it creates is so disturbing (which I enjoyed) and cult-like that I wouldn't consider it a book that triumphs feminism. It is more a book about feminism gone wrong to me, when women are so unwilling to work with men that the world poisons them.

Dystopias tend to work with the world around us to create their plots, which is why I mostly see this as a critique of radical feminism than a 'this is why feminism is good' story. True, I may have misunderstood the author's intention, but I feel like Mackintosh's mysterious way of writing is to allow us to read whatever we want into this.

Overall, I did enjoy this, but I am disappointed that it seems to be marketed as such a strong pro-feminist narrative. I am a feminist, but I'm one that doesn't think shutting women away on their own little island is going to help them, or save them, which I think this book tries to show. Also, the writing style wasn't wholly for me.

I’ve been watching Season 2 of the The Handmaid’s Tale and feel like I could do with some therapy, myself. (Side note: If you’ve started and are ready to give up, persist until at least episode 6, and then see how you feel).

The Water Cure is written in a similar way to The Handmaid’s Tale, in that it’s a first-person narrative which passes from daughter to daughter but you never quite get the full picture. Until you do, and then you kind of wish you hadn’t…

It’s seriously disturbing and very well written. This is the kind of book that you finish reading, shiver a little, and peek outside your window… just to check.

Beautifully written debut which is perfectly timed with the new series of The Handmaid's Tale. With the naive point of view of three sisters, it twists and turns as it reveals some disturbing truths. I guessed a couple of the twists but it didn't spoil it. Highly recommended.

A dystopian novel about three sisters - Grace, Lia and Sky. It leaves the reader with a lot of unanswered questions about why the girls have been removed from the rest of the world.

I read the novel greedily and fiercely in one sitting! I know the book will stay with me for a long time and I will definitely be re-reading at least once. I was mesmerised from the opening page and the tale of sisterhood, dark secrets and the very essence of womanhood evoked something in me I haven’t felt since I read “The Virgin Suicides.” The book was so well written and drew you into a world that simultaneously felt realistic and of another time and place. Almost indescribably good, this is a triumphant debut and I can’t wait to read what comes next.

This hypnotic read left me with more questions than answers and was profoundly intelligent.

How do we love safely? How do we trust one another? How do we control emotions? How do we manipulate the truth? How does consent manifest itself? How does gender define role? How much is too much?

I am not entirely convinced that it was strictly speaking a dystopian novel. We are led to believe that men specifically carry a virus or bacteria that is harmful to women specifically, but I wasn't convinced. I believe there was an outbreak of sorts, which potentially affected women more keenly or was transmitted through sexual contact. But I think the danger was exaggerated by King and used as a ploy to isolate a group of vulnerable individuals and abuse them - both physically and mentally - at his will.

It has touches of many other books - Hot Milk, The Handmaid's Tale, Lord Of The Flies, The Virgin Suicides, Gather The Daughters, The Natural Way Of Things, The Girls - whilst being completely disparate at the same time, which is a beautiful accomplishment.

P.S. This book is going to be huge, so read it and form your own opinion (and questions!)

--- Blog post scheduled for 30 May ---

Grace, Lia and Sky have been taught by their parents to fear men. Their father, King, has taken them to an isolated location and has surrounded the area with barbed wire and has put buoys out in the water. He doesn’t want anyone to enter, nor does he want his daughters to leave. The world outside of their safe haven has become a violent one, with men turning against women. The women in the outside world are growing ill from the toxins of that world and sometimes make it to their shores where the sisters’ mother gives the ill women the water cure. Grace, Lia and Sky all undergo therapies to keep them safe. Their father and mother are obeyed without question. But when King disappears, two men and a young boy wash ashore. The sisters have no way of knowing whether they will survive this new threat.

I’m amazed that this is the author’s debut novel. She has the heart of a poet. This book reads like a fairy tale, the kind that sends chills up your spine. The life of these sisters just broke my heart. The rituals and therapies they were forced to endure were without doubt cruel ones and it’s unclear as to their purpose throughout most of the book. The author creates an atmosphere of constant tension and unease. While some of the ending didn’t come as a surprise to me, there were points when I was quite taken back by revelations. All questions aren’t answered but that didn’t matter a bit to me. It’s a book that I will long remember and I’m sure it’s headed for quite a few literary prizes.

Hauntingly beautiful and most highly recommended.

I can’t remember seeing a more perfect cover for a book in a while. Everything you need to know about The Water Cure is there. The obscure water hiding all manner of unknowable things. The girl vulnerable, head lifted, neck exposed. The fleshiness, with the female body at the centre of everything. The unanswered questions. The spare and stark simplicity of it.

This is a book of atmosphere, rather than action. It reminds me a lot of Deborah Levy’s wonderful Hot Milk. The writing is similarly poetic, and it blisters with all the same drowsy heat and psychological instability. Added to that is an atmosphere of stagnation and decay. Things that have been still too long. “The tomatoes, nearer the house, have taken on a life of their own. Their fruit falls and attracts stinging insects. A jam of dirt, overblown globs and seeds.”

The three girls at the centre of The Water Cure have taken on a life of their own too.

Their mother and King, their father, keep them isolated in a huge house on an island. They’re kept away from the dangerous men and toxins of the rest of the world, and subjected to numerous damaging “cures,” like “The Drowning Game” or “Love Therapy.” At the start of the novel King disappears, and not long afterwards, their mother does too. The girls are left to interpret the world themselves, through the hazy filter of what they’ve been taught.

The book starts from the unusual perspective of all three sisters together, thinking and narrating in unison, like a siren song. Their perspectives soon separate as everything descends towards a feminist Lord of the Flies.

It’s been presented as a near-future dystopia, but so much of it could be from the present day. The Water Cure itself: a Google search for the term finds people still following the discredited advice of some quack promoting water and salt cures. The attitude of men: in one description of the outside world, someone says: “I didn’t understand how rapidly things had changed, how all that had been needed was permission for everything to go to shit, and that permission had been granted.” — The election of Donald Trump springs to mind. Emotional toxins: the girls have been taught that, “Trauma is a toxin that hooks into our hair and organs and blood and becomes part of us, the way heavy metals do, our bodies nothing more than a layering of flesh around everything ingested and experienced.” A yoga teacher has said something similar to me recently.

This could be present day or future, the dangers real or imagined; the truth is slippery here and ungraspable. The obscurity of it all is at once frustrating and admirable. Nothing is fully spelled out and the margin for interpretation is wide: you are submerged in their world to either sink or swim. I like that, but while I admire the author for keeping us in the dark, there are points where I can't quite believe the characters wouldn’t have more curiosity about each other. It undermines the effect slightly.

But one thing emerges from the murky depths in full clarity, and that’s loneliness. The sisters, who start so close they think as one, have had a wedge driven between them. The natural sisterly love/hate dynamic is exaggerated by their circumstances to breaking point, and leaves them isolated. The middle sister, Lia, epitomises the loneliness most acutely. Although she blames herself even for that: “Every time I think I am very lonely, it becomes bleaker and more true. You can think things into being. You can dwell them up from the ground.” And as her older sister, Grace, says: “Sudden love, when gifted to a habitually unloved person, can induce nausea. It can become a thing you would claw and debase yourself for.”

Like the girl on the cover, alone in that cloudy sea of blue. She could be looking around for help, for her sisters, for just anyone to share the world with. And its an immersive experience, at once uncomfortable and intriguing, to see what she finds.

An eerie read that left me with more questions than answers, The Water Cure is set away from the mainland and follows three sisters trying to make sense of their world. Influenced by their abusive mother and father, the story is unreliable and dark. Descriptions of their home and environment were rich and poetic at times, and I could easily identify with the strong bonds of sisterhood.

I enjoyed this book but would have liked to have known more about the back story to help enrich the characters. I also wanted to know more about the mainland compared to the 'island' to make sense of how they came to be there.

I've seen a lot of reviews about this book, and so I started reading with some trepidation. But it is not the confusing mess it has been made out to be. It is a beautiful, lyrical story of women, women who know intimately the violence of men.

The bond between women, the sisterhood, is a powerful force. In The Water Cure, we have three sisters who are bonded so tightly they are almost one. The author delves into important feminist themes, and one of the most interesting is the relationship between mothers and daughters. How wide is the gap between love and envy?

I would liken this book to The Handmaid's Tale, which seems an obvious comparison, but it is in the same style. So much is weaved between the pages, so many themes and underlying truths. The prose is beautiful, the story captivating. Read it.

This book.

It is so very difficult to describe this book, which is I think one of the reasons why the blurb is so vague. This is the story of three sisters, growing up on an island with their parents where something is obviously not quite right but many things remain vague for the whole book. It is never clear whether the stories their parents tell them of the rest of the world are true or not. I personally adored this vagueness and the hypnotic and introspective way this story unfolds.

Sophie Mackintosh’s prose is lush and evocative; her sentences are breathtakingly beautiful and she spins her metaphors in such a brilliant way. Imagery of water is threaded through the whole book, changing meaning and implication depending on the narrator and the context. I adored that.

The author plays with voices and perspectives in a way that I obviously loved. I am a big fan of stories told, at least in parts, in a “we-“perspective and Mackintosh wields that difficult voice expertly. She switches perspectives in just the right moments and allows her narrators to be unreliable without loosing authenticity.

At the heart, this is a story about sisters (nobody is surprised that I love that) and their disfunctional relationship. The way in which flashbacks into their childhoods were integrated is brilliant and effortless and left me always wanting more while being able to fill in some blanks myself – I love it when authors trust me enough to do just that. I found the parts that examined their love and the way their parents broke them to be by far the strongest, whereas the storyline with the men washed ashore did not always work for me.

I thought that the pacing in the middle dragged a little, but the beginning and the ending were pitch-perfect. I cannot wait to see what Sophie Mackintosh does next, because I will definitely reading it.

First sentence: “First we have a father, but our father dies without us noticing.”

This is, in my opinion, a mind bending book. I've read it, enjoyed it and still don't know where or when it is set. You get very little idea of the world at large. The women are isolated, and the isolation comes across strongly, in the way the book is presented. It took me a chapter or two to get into it - it's totally different to the 'usual' way of writing a book, but once I made the switch in my mind I couldn't put it down and read it in one sitting.

Loved it.

'The Water Cure' is a story of three sisters, an island and the men who shatter their solitary way of living. This is a beautiful, strange, singular book, reminiscent of the style of Shirley Jackson and Angela Carter. The writing is lyrical and holds you at arms distance, revealing key elements of the plot in dribs and drabs yet ensuring you're utterly engrossed while reading it. I adored its portrayal of first love - the obsessiveness of it and how it can set you aflame yet utterly destroy you all at the same time. I've heard a few reviewers describe it as being 'dreamlike' which is a very accurate description. Sophie Mackintosh deserves all the plaudits which are coming to her.

Title: The Water CureThe Water Cure

Author: Sophie Mackintosh

From the back: 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.

The gist: What a beautiful, dark book. It reads a little like you’re floating. Somewhere between being caught in a heat haze and drowning in a slightly cloudy yard pool. There’s something delicate about this book, something ever-so-slightly ethereal. And yet, something dark and unnerving.

It’s not a book with hard edges – it’s not something you’ll enjoy if you love joined up endings and matter-of-face plotlines. But if your reading tipple is composed of beautifully poetic prose, writing that lets you fill in the gaps (or leave them there) then this is for you.

It’s a dark, playful exploration of growing up, of being a girl, and of control with a haunting quality that will stay with you long after you finish it.

And if you needed any other reasons to read it; it has strains of Margaret Atwood, of The Virgin Suicides, and of Dogtooth.

[Interlude: if you haven’t seen Dogtooth I highly recommend it. It’s a darkly surreal Greek film, and on my top ten list]

Others have called the book ‘odd’ – and I agree. It’s odd like ‘the fascinating trinket you find in the back of a drawer.’ It’s odd like ‘the dream you can only just remember when you wake up.’ It’s odd like ‘have you seen the news recently?’

And, most interestingly – it’s uncomfortable, which is almost always a good thing.

Favourite line: We are lucky, because we have been exposed to minimal damage.

Read if: You want to feel like you stood up a bit too quickly on a very hot day (in a good way).

Read with: Margaret Atwood (tbf just do everything with Margaret Atwood)

4.5 Stars
"The real trick is how and why we keep surviving at all."
If Margaret Atwood co-wrote a book with post-structuralist feminist author Helene Cixous, this might be the product of that union.
Dream-like and poetic, it is a tale of deep loss, love and of what it means to be a woman. It is a meditation on our society and whether Utopia can ever really exist.
The heat rises from the pages. The girls' voices are strong and clear and ensure we have a visceral sense of the island and of the characters' feelings. On that, I wanted to hear more from Sky's perspective.
It is a highly unusual novel that would generally fall outside my "comfort zone" of reading parameters, however I found the novel itself gripping and beautiful and read it within 24 hours. I had to find the "answers", to the extent extent there were any.
It is a haunting book that I will be thinking about and talking over in the coming weeks and months. It's not a book I would recommend to all of my friends - only those who don't mind a challenging read and who enjoy a truly unusual, expressive, thought-provoking experience.
Thank you to NetGalley, Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Books UK and Sophie Mackintosh for this ARC, provided for the purposes of an honest review.

I found this book had so much potential as it pictures an interesting version of dystopia. As a fan of dystopian books, I was hoping the idea will develop further, but unfortunately there are too many questions and not many answers. I suppose the author wanted to give a reader an open space for imagination and to be able to come to our own conclusions.

I was struggling for a good half of the book but kept pursuing. When the men arrived to the island, things started to progress but it came to a disappointing end. I can’t call it an end as well and don’t really see a reason to leave the story at that point. Is it going to be the second book after this?

As I mentioned, the concept of the story is quite interesting and at some places thought-provoking, but the plot hasn’t progressed to anything and really hasn’t given any reasons, answers or meanings.