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Watch Sophie Mackinstosh discuss her debut novel 'The Water Cure' which has been longlisted for the Man Booker prize 2018, at Waterstones in Covent Garden. Sophie does a reading for us followed by a talk about how she came to write this extraordinary novel and the creative process behind it.
Hypnotic, dreamlike and compulsive, a blazing literary debut for fans of Hot Milk, The Girls andThe Vegetarian
'Immensely assured, calmly devastating. This is a gem of a novel and I was bowled over by it' - Katherine Angel, author of Unmastered
'Eerie, electric, beautiful. It rushes you through to the end on a tide of tension and closely held panic. I loved this book' - Daisy Johnson, author of Fen
'Creepy and delightful - it has a pinch of Shirley Jackson, a dash of chlorine, and an essence all of its own' - Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Harmless Like You
Imagine a world very close to our own: where women are not safe in their bodies, where desperate measures are required to raise a daughter. This is the story of Grace, Lia and Sky, kept apart from the world for their own good and taught the terrible things that every woman must learn about love. And it is the story of the men who come to find them - three strangers washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent, trailing desire and destruction in their wake.
The Water Cure is a fever dream, a blazing vision of suffering, sisterhood and transformation.
'Devastating. A work of cool, claustrophobic beauty' Eli Goldstone, author of Strange Heart Beating
'Otherworldly, brutal and poetic: a feminist fable set by the sea, a utopia gone awry, a female Lord of the Flies. It transported me, savaged me, filled me with hope and fear. It felt like a book I'd been waiting to read for a long time' Emma Jane Unsworth, author of Animals As Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh objects to being held accountable for his behavior in high school, we look at the criminalization of black and brown students that has led to what is known as the school-to-prison pipeline. We speak with a roundtable of community activists engaged in the fight to save schools and push for alternatives to punishment and privatization. Their voices are highlighted in a new book titled “Lift Us Up, Don’t Push Us Out! Voices from the Front Lines of the Educational Justice Movement.” In Chicago, we speak with Jitu Brown, the national director of the Journey for Justice. In Washington, D.C., we speak with Zakiya Sankara-Jabar, the co-founder of Racial Justice NOW! and field organizer for the Dignity in Schools Campaign. And in New York City, we speak with high school teacher and restorative justice coordinator E.M. Eisen-Markowitz and Mark Warren, co-author of “Lift Us Up, Don’t Push Us Out!” 
Journalist Monica Hesse and writer Maris Kreizman discuss Hesse’s new book “American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land,” now in paperback.
The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn’t stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was desolate. There were hundreds of abandoned buildings, and by the dozen they were burning.
The culprit, and the path that led to these crimes, is a story of twenty-first century America. Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse first drove down to the reeling county to cover a hearing for Charlie Smith, a struggling mechanic who upon his capture had promptly pleaded guilty to sixty-seven counts of arson. But as Charlie’s confession unspooled, it got deeper and weirder. He wasn’t lighting fires alone; his crimes were galvanized by a surprising love story. Over a year of investigating, Hesse uncovered the motives of Charlie and his accomplice, girlfriend Tonya Bundick, a woman of steel-like strength and an inscrutable past. Theirs was a love built on impossibly tight budgets and simple pleasures. They were each other’s inspiration and escape…until they weren’t.
Though it’s hard to believe today, one hundred years ago Accomack was the richest rural county in the nation. Slowly it’s been drained of its industry and agriculture, as well as its wealth and population. In an already remote region, limited employment options offer little in the way of opportunity. A mesmerizing and crucial panorama with nationwide implications, American Fire asks what happens when a community gets left behind. Hesse brings to life the Eastern Shore and its inhabitants, battling a punishing economy and increasingly terrified by a string of fires they could not explain. The result evokes the soul of rural America, a land half gutted before the fires even began.
Maris Kreizman is a writer and critic and the author of the book “Slaughterhouse 90210.” New York Times bestseller, Georgetown University sociology professor, and one of America's premier public intellectuals, Michael Eric Dyson, joins us for a discussion of his new book, What Truth Sounds Like.
In 1963 Attorney General Robert Kennedy sought out James Baldwin to explain the rage that threatened to engulf black America. Baldwin brought along some friends, including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, psychologist Kenneth Clark, and activist Jerome Smith. It was Smith's relentless, unfiltered fury that set Kennedy on his heels. Kennedy walked away from the nearly 3-hour meeting angry that the black folk assembled didn't understand politics and weren't as easy to talk to as Martin Luther King. But his anger quickly gave way to empathy, especially for Smith. He set about changing policy, the meeting having transformed his thinking in fundamental ways. Lynne Thompson is the author of the poetry collections "Start with a Small Guitar" (What Books Press, 2013) and "Beg No Pardon" (Perugia Press, 2007) winner of a Perugia Press First Book Award and the Great Lakes Colleges New Writers Award. She also received a 2015 Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.). Her poems have appeared in many journals including "Poetry," "Ploughshares," "Salamander," "Prairie Schooner," "Rattle," "African American Review," "Crab Creek Review," "Poetry Internationa"l and several anthologies including, "Nasty Women Poets: An Anthology of Subversive Verse" (Lost Horse Press, 2017). A former practicing attorney, Thompson lives in Los Angeles and is the reviews and essays editor for the literary journal, "Spillway." The interview is part of a series hosted by L.A. poet Mariano Zaro, available at www.Poetry.LA
