Mackintosh’s prose matches her method: often beautiful and otherworldly, violent and tender, reverberating into the darkness. Everything else is vague this is a dreamworld, centred on a kind of vivid, claustrophobic myopia surrounded by an undifferentiated cruelty.

In this authoritarian, patriarchal world only things that are seen close up – a dress, a drink, the boot of a car, the locket containing a ticket that every woman must wear, and above all the female body with all its layers of perception, physical, mental and emotional – are detailed. The two groups of girls are then separated from each other, and usually never see each other again. In her new novel, the isolation of the house has been expanded to include an entire unnamed country where, when their periods begin, girls are given either a white ticket, because they are required to have children, or a blue ticket and an implant, meaning that they never will. Only like this, argued the parents, could the girls be protected from the toxic air elsewhere anywhere, specifically, where men might live. In her first, Booker-longlisted novel, The Water Cure, it was a family, three girls and their parents, alone in a grand house on an unnamed coast, with white walls and swimming pools cracking under relentless sunshine. T here is great power, Sophie Mackintosh has discovered, in taking a familiar thing –so familiar that we no longer see it clearly – moving it to a place slightly adjacent to our world, then bringing it into closer and closer focus until we can see nothing else.

Blue ticket a novel