The Water Cure: A Novel

"It seems like lately we’ve been calling everything “toxic.” The Water Cure, a tart, uncanny debut novel by Sophie Mackintosh, tests the limits of this metaphor. A group of women live on a remote island to protect themselves from men, whom they believe to be literally toxic. It’s never clear if women on the “mainland” are really getting sick, or if the protagonists are living in a cultish separatist movement with extreme beliefs, but the novel elegantly interrogates a suddenly ubiquitous concept."