‘Women can be complicit in systems of violence, especially in families’: Writer Sophie Mackintosh

Many writers struggle to articulate the questions one often asks in a milieu barraged with words scrubbed hollow with repetition. (These words are admonishingly accompanied by the prefix “buzz”.) Fiction writers who embrace these words and gleefully position them within their writing appear neutered, so willing to be easily slotted into a lens that one would hope they find uncomfortable, but ultimately don't because now, having the “right” opinions is good collateral. Sophie Mackintosh isn’t such a writer. She’s better than that.

Perhaps this is why her debut novel, The Water Cure, was nominated for the 2018 Man Booker Prize, and in 2023, she was named on the Granta Best of Young British Novelists list, compiled every ten years since 1983, identifying the 20 most significant British novelists aged under 40.

When I read Mackintosh’s The Water Cure, I felt like a child lulled into a disorienting reality that was commonplace for the characters. A family of five self-isolated in a hotel on an empty island operates a wellness centre for infected women from the mainland. Men are the infection, disallowed from entering the island, the only exception the father – King – of the family. When three men arrive at the island, this quasi-utopia breaks. It was wafer-thin...

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