Mackintosh, Sophie
Entry updated 27 February 2023. Tagged: Author.
(1988- ) UK poet and author whose first novel, The Water Cure (2018), is set in a Near Future world whose three teenage female protagonists are raised in restrictive ritual-choked Keep on what they believe to be an isolated Island (see Prisons); in the belief that men have become dangerously allergic to women, their mother subjects them to distorting apotropaic rituals. The style of Mackintosh's telling is elevated but sparse in detail, and verges upon allegory, with the parents known as Mother and King (see Mainstream Writers of SF); after three men arrive on the island, nature (as it seems to be understood by all involved) takes its course. In her second novel, the Dystopian Near Future Blue Ticket (2020), children may only be conceived by women who have won a lottery; the protagonist, illicitly pregnant, goes on the run, but is increasingly haunted (see Horror in SF) by the conviction that the foetus inside is "consuming" her. A sense that her tales occupy aftermath worlds only indirectly (but disturbingly) addressed by their surface storylines seems manifest in her third novel, Cursed Bread (2023), an ostensibly mundane tale haunted by almost unstated memories of a town metonymously devastated by poisoned food. [JC]
Sophie Mackintosh
born Wales: 1988
works
- The Water Cure (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2018) [hb/]
- Blue Ticket (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2020) [hb/]
- Cursed Bread (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2023) [hb/]
links
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