The Water Cure

The Water Cure is a feminist dystopian revenge fantasy by Sophie Mackintosh. First published in 2018, and longlisted for the 2018 Booker Prize, the novel follows what happens when three sisters fight back against their father’s oppressive regime. Critics praise the book for its comments on toxic masculinity and the capacity for violence against women. Mackintosh is best known for her short stories which have featured in prominent publications such as Granta and TANK magazine. She has won numerous awards for her writing, including the 2016 White Review Short Story Prize. The Water Cure is her debut novel.

The novel is set some time in the future and it takes place on a nameless island. The three central characters are sisters Grace, Lia, and Sky. Although their ages are never specified, it’s implied that Grace is the eldest. Grace feels responsible for her sisters and worries about them constantly.

The girls live with their mother, Mother, and their father, King. King fears that wild, violent men from the mainland will rape and assault his family, and he raised his daughters to fear men. To hold back these potential invaders, King turned the family’s island home into a fortress. He laid barbed wire around the island’s perimeter, and he placed signs everywhere warning people not to come ashore.



Readers learn early on that Grace is pregnant. King is the father. He believes he has the right to use his daughters however he sees fit because he protects them from barbaric men on the mainland. Mother doesn’t say anything because she’s terrified of King. She advises her daughters to stay meek and obedient because life on the island is better than anywhere else.

One day, King disappears. He went to check on the perimeter and he never returned. The girls don’t know what to do because they’ve lost their protector. Mother isn’t much help, either, because she’s never looked after a family on her own before. For five long months, the family falls into chaos, until one day, strangers arrive on the beach. These strangers change the family’s fate forever.

Mother ventures out to greet the three strange men. There are two brothers, James and Llew, and Gwil, Llew’s son. All they need is some shelter and a place to rest. Mother doesn’t want to let them inside the house, but she doesn’t know how to make them leave. She warns them to stay away from her daughters and reluctantly opens her house to them.



Meanwhile, Grace goes into labor. She delivers a stillborn baby and the sisters grieve together. Lia, looking for comfort, runs into Llew. She fancies him instantly, and the attraction is mutual. Grace warns Lia to stay away from Llew because he’ll hurt her, but Lia doesn’t listen. It’s not long before she’s sharing a room with him.

In the meantime, Mother goes missing. Llew claims that she went to the mainland for supplies. The girls worry about Mother wandering around the mainland all alone, surrounded by vicious men. James and Llew want to know more about the sisters and their strange way of life, because they claim that there’s nothing wrong with the men on the mainland.

It turns out that King and Mother ran a sanctuary for sexually abused women. The women visited the island for water therapy, which King claimed could help them forget their past traumas. The problem is that King raped the women, which caused them to commit suicide or leave forever. Mother knew all this, but she didn’t know how to stand up to King.



One night, Gwil goes missing. Everyone searches for him but it’s too dark to see anything. They eventually find him trapped in barbed wire by the shoreline, but he’s already dead. The men decide that it’s time to leave the island, but not before Llew sleeps with Lia. He tells her that he doesn’t plan on seeing her ever again, and she feels used and dirty.

James returns to the house to say goodbye to Grace. She admits that King wasn’t her biological father. They had a consensual sexual relationship for many years, and she misses him terribly. James is glad to hear this, because King sent him to the island on a mission. James must retrieve the family and take them to King.

Before Grace can find her sisters, James tells her the truth about the island. The island is a small piece of land which has been blocked off from the outside world. It isn’t an island at all. What’s more, Llew killed Mother because she would stop the girls from leaving the sanctuary.



Hysterical, Grace kills James and runs off to find her sisters. She tells Lia to shoot Llew because he’ll kill them all once he finds out what happened to James. Lia shoots Llew and he dies instantly. The sisters run hot baths and cleanse themselves of their trauma. They venture beyond the barbed wire and, although they don’t know where the road leads, they plan on building a new life somewhere far away from King.