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The Water Cure
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Hannah Murray, Gemma Whelan, Morfydd Clark
- Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins
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The Water Cure
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Publisher's Summary
"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.
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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What listeners say about The Water Cure
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Karen W. Lam
- 2019-06-29
Haunting, Strange but So Compelling
The writing is so beautiful in this book - so much that the horrors and the violence become almost poetic. Two of the narrators are completely compelling but one feels so affectless that it's almost jarring. I think this audiobook will stay with me for years to come.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 2019-02-23
Good premise- so-so delivery
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.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- JCV
- 2021-05-31
Dystopian and strange
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
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Natalie B
- 2019-01-15
Tension
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.
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1 person found this helpful