The Water Cure

Critics Review

• Compulsive, eerily gorgeous, [it] will have you gripped until the end… A film adaptation feels inevitable… As far as debuts go, this is superb

  Irish News

• A feminist dystopian fairy tale, a sexual coming-of-age story and a survival-of-the-fittest tale. Evocative, suspenseful and bleak – in short, everything this age seems to be demanding

  NPR

• [An] eerie, uncanny literary debut… Beautifully written, pared down and hypnotic

  Sunday Times Culture

• Bewitching… [An] ambiguous utopia

  Guardian

• In raw, visceral prose, Mackintosh probes at ideas of the threat of male violence, the ways women are told to protect ourselves, love and sisterhood and survival. A hypnotic, stormy book, with one of my favourite endings I’ve read in a long while

  The Pool

• Stunning… A haunting story of abuse, death, and desire… Chilling and topical, a breathtaking debut

  Dazed

• Eerily beautiful, this strange, unsettling novel creeps up and grabs hold of you

  Paula Hawkins, author of 'The Girl on the Train'

• Darkly gratifying, dreamy, primal, and arresting [as] a fairy tale… The overgrown grounds, with their perimeter of rusty barbed wire and shark-infested waters, resemble Sleeping Beauty’s castle

  New Yorker

• Searing, richly drawn, eerily compelling… As foreboding in what it holds back as in what it reveals

  Stylist

• Elemental… [A] utopia portrayed in spectral, organic prose… Mackintosh is a wonderful stylist; the full scope of her imagination, as well as the cohesion of her vision, is evident on every page… A seriously impressive feat

  Irish Times

• [A] wildly confident debut… Take the strange social ceremonies of The Lobster and the pheromone-rich claustrophobia of The Beguiled and you come close to the world Sophie Mackintosh conjures

  AnOther Magazine

• An extraordinary debut… Otherworldly, luminous, precise

  Guardian

• Bold, inventive, haunting… With shades of Margaret Atwood and Eimear McBride, you’ll be bowled over by it

  Stylist (61 Books to Read This Spring)

• The Water Cure is eerily still and pure – with saline bite… Mackintosh asks if it is the traumas of our pasts that ultimately pose the greatest threat to our futures

  New Statesman

• Powerfully unsettling, immensely assured, calmly devastating. It conjures a world both alien and familiar, exploring the physical and psychological cruelties enacted on women, by men, in the name of their protection, and the noble and ignoble uses to which anger can be put in a perverse world. This is a gem of a novel, and I was bowled over by it

  Katherine Angel, author of 'Unmastered'

• Electric [and] beautifully strange… Her novel is an exercise in minimalism

  Times Literary Supplement

• A hypnotic read… This extraordinary debut is a feminist, quasi-dystopian read – great for fans of Hot Milk, The Girls and The Vegetarian

  Elle

• A work of cool, claustrophobic beauty. Sophie Mackintosh writes devastatingly well about the complexities that women face in loving men, and in loving each other

  Eli Goldstone, author of 'Strange Heart Beating'

• Uneasy, mythic, lawless… The atmospheric landscapes cloak trauma and violence in wisps of uncertainty, where bad feelings coalesce as both presciently felt and strangely unknowable

  Frieze

• Otherworldly, brutal and poetic: a feminist fable set by the sea, a utopia gone awry, a female Lord of the Flies. It transported me, savaged me, filled me with hope and fear. It felt like a book I’d been waiting to read for a long time

  Emma Jane Unsworth, author of 'Animals'

• [A] lyrical debut, original and very atmospheric

  Good Housekeeping

• Eerie, electric, beautiful. It rushes you through to the end on a tide of tension and closely held panic. I loved this book

  Daisy Johnson, author of 'Fen'

• Creepy and delightful, a portrayal of post-apocalyptic puberty, intermingling desire and despair. It has a pinch of Shirley Jackson, a dash of chlorine, and an essence all of its own

  Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of 'Harmless Like You'

• Powerful, mythic, seductively sinister… Her alternative world is as carefully imagined as one of Margaret Atwood’s… [Sophie Mackintosh] is a writer to be reckoned with

  Book Oxygen

• Eerie and unsettling, the novel exerts a hypnotic grip as the tension builds

  Daily Mail

• A superb debut

  i

• The Water Cure deserves a Sofia Coppola-style big-screen treatment, although its cultish overtones and sinister denouement are as reminiscent of The Wicker Man as The Virgin Suicides

  The Literary Review