The Water Cure by Sophie MacKintosh (Hamish Hamilton) $35

Dystopia and misogyny are hot topics right now, both in fiction and reality, although it’s becoming increasingly harder to distinguish between the two. Sophie MacKintosh’s The Water Cure takes that to its next logical step, imagining a world where toxic masculinity is physically toxic.

The book is prescient about the concerns of our time, taking women’s fears over bodily autonomy and safety, and in the way of the best metaphors, making them real.

Like in our own society, in the world of The Water Cure, women’s bodies – how to tame them, how to hide them – has become a preoccupation. Here, men are both drawn to the emotionality wafting out of the women like beacons, and are also poisonous to the women themselves, causing the sisters at the centre of MacKintosh’s narrative to perpetually examine each other for illness, scrubbing toxins and feelings away.

The cold Grace and the needy Lia present their isolated and insular life and describe the cures their absent father and controlling mother designed to protect them from men. These cures, which invariably involve punishing female bodies rather than controlling male ones, read more as torture treatments than the actions of loving parents. The sisters are prevented from having or showing love, and are made to plunge and hold their hands in ice water, or hyperventilate until they collapse, scream into the earth, or the worst one: ‘‘The water cure.’’

Although filled with both emotional and physical violence, the book is a languid albeit unsettling read. It’s the kind of book designed to be turned into a film starring Kirsten Dunst or one of the Fanning sisters. Compulsive, but one that demands the reader examine our current world. In a world where men (yes, all men) are seen as dangerous and literally toxic, what is the duty of women to protect themselves? And when men break through the barriers women have so carefully constructed, is the poison they bring with them contaminating the sisters’ minds or bodies?

There are certainly shades of Margaret Atwood here, and of Charlotte Wood, as MacKintosh tucks and weaves between the sisters’ group and individual narrations. She brings in women outside the family through the sisters’ readings from the ‘‘Welcome Book’’, a collection of memories by the women who have in the past found themselves as refugees from an increasingly violent world of men. The sisters read these to remind themselves of the danger they face, and it’s here we find our own world most uncomfortably reflected back to us.

It’s an extension of the things we already say to our daughters. ‘‘Walk in pairs.’’ ‘‘Don’t go out in the dark.’’ ‘‘Cover up.’’ And it shows us the grim logical conclusion of asking women to bear the weight of masculine misbehaviour. The Water Cure isa book filled with the pain that women endure, and the pain they inflict on themselves and each other in order to cope with it.

–