DEBUTS
THE WATER CURE by Sophie Mackintosh (Hamish Hamilton £12.99)
THREE sisters — Grace, Lia and Sky — live with their widowed mother in a dilapidated house on a deserted island. Taken there by their late father, the girls have been brought up on a strict regime designed to protect them from the toxins and dangers in the outside world and from men, who are not to be trusted.
They endure all manner of brutal cleansing ‘therapies’ inflicted by Mother.
However, when three men are washed up on the beach after a shipwreck, everything changes.
Grace is irresistibly attracted to one of them — despite the disapproval and warnings from Mother and her sisters.
Eerie and unsettling, the novel exerts a hypnotic grip as the tension builds.
The girls are untethered from what they know and are forced to question the beliefs with which they’ve been brought up.
THE INSOMNIA MUSEUM by Laurie Canciani (Apollo £14.99)
ANNA, 17, is kept incarcerated by her addict father in their flat in an abandoned tower block. She has never set foot in the outside world. With the windows boarded up, she’s never even seen it.
Every so often, he goes out for supplies, leaving her locked in with the Insomnia Museum they’ve created together from items in the teetering piles of junk he’s brought home. When Anna’s father dies of an overdose, help comes in the shape of a local God-fearing do-gooder, Lucky, who takes her to his own flat on a sink estate.
There, she befriends his drugdealing son, Tick, and begins to get a taste of the life her father was sheltering her from.
Fizzing with energy and written in occasionally unfinished, staccato sentences, Canciani paints an atmospheric portrait of a world fuelled by deprivation and the will to survive.
THE WATERS AND THE WILD by DeSales Harrison (Oneworld £14.99)
THE Rev Nelson Spurlock is the recipient of the testament of Daniel Abend, a psychotherapist and single father from New York. Daniel writes of the death of one of his patients, Jessica Burke. Shortly after receiving and ignoring evidence that she was murdered, his own daughter disappears.
Since then, he has been getting sinister notes and photographs — suggesting that the sender knows her whereabouts, but also key elements of Daniel’s past.
Central is his love affair with an unstable young Frenchwoman whose death, among other things, he must atone for.
After a promising start, this uneven novel labours under self-conscious prose, which is a shame, since an intriguing psychological thriller with a strong emotional punch is struggling to find its way out.