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The Water Cure

A Novel

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The Water Cure

Written by: Sophie Mackintosh
Narrated by: Hannah Murray, Gemma Whelan, Morfydd Clark
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About this listen

"A gripping, sinister fable!" (Margaret Atwood, via Twitter)

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2018 MAN BOOKER PRIZE

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:
NPR • GLAMOUR • GOOD HOUSEKEEPING • LIT HUB • THRILLIST

A dystopic feminist revenge fantasy about three sisters on an isolated island, raised to fear men

King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky. He has lain the barbed wire; he has anchored the buoys in the water; he has marked out a clear message: Do not enter. Or viewed from another angle: Not safe to leave. Here women are protected from the chaos and violence of men on the mainland. The cult-like rituals and therapies they endure fortify them from the spreading toxicity of a degrading world.

But when their father, the only man they've ever seen, disappears, they retreat further inward until the day two men and a boy wash ashore. Over the span of one blistering hot week, a psychological cat-and-mouse game plays out. Sexual tensions and sibling rivalries flare as the sisters confront the amorphous threat the strangers represent. Can they survive the men?

A haunting, riveting debut about the capacity for violence and the potency of female desire, The Water Cure both devastates and astonishes as it reflects our own world back at us.

©2019 Sophie Mackintosh (P)2019 Random House Audio Coming of Age Dystopian Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Science Fiction Suspense Thriller & Suspense Exciting

What the critics say

“Eerily beautiful, this strange, unsettling novel creeps up and grabs hold of you.” (Paula Hawkins, New York Times best-selling author of Girl on the Train)

"Chilling...unsettling...a story that feels both futuristic and like an eerily familiar fable." (Alexandra Alter, The New York Times)

“An extraordinary otherworldly debut...[Mackintosh] is writing the way that Sofia Coppola would shoot the end of the world: Everything is luminous.” (The Guardian)
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I am a hardcore fan of the futuristic dystopian genre, and I was very excited to read this book based on reviews. However, I found the story developed too slowly and it was hard to stay absorbed in it. The narrators did a great job, although it seems like there are parts from the mother's perspective at the end of chapters that don't use a different narrator, which was very confusing the first couple of times it happened. In the end, I did not find this book as satisfying as I had hoped, but it was still pretty good.

Good premise- so-so delivery

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Enjoyably bizzare story. I had the read the synopsis to figure out what was going on, but after that, it was an interesting weird ride through feminist distopia

Dystopian and strange

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Right from the first words, there was an odd tension in this story. I was fascinated by it and the never-quite-answered questions I have are still lingering in my thoughts. I recommend.

Tension

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