About the Book
From the Booker-nominated author of The Water Cure - an eerie historical mystery about desire, memory and madness
If you eat the bread, you'll die, he said. The statement made no sense, but it filled me with an electric dread.
Elodie is the baker's wife. Plain, unremarkable, ignored, she burns with a secret hunger to be extraordinary. One day a charismatic new couple appear in town and Elodie quickly falls under their spell. All summer long she stalks them through the shining streets- inviting herself into their home, listening to their coded conversations, longing to possess them.
Meanwhile, beneath the tranquil surface of daily life, strange things are happening. Six horses are found dead in a sun-drenched field. Widows see their husbands walking spectral up the moonlit river. A teenage boy throws himself into the bonfire at the midsummer feast. A dark intoxication is spreading through the town, and when Elodie finally understands her role in it, it will be too late to stop.
Audacious and mesmerising, Cursed Bread is a tale of a town gripped by madness, envy like poison in the blood, and desire that burns and consumes.
About the Author :
Sophie Mackintosh is the author of three novels- The Water Cure, Blue Ticket and Cursed Bread. Her debut novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018 and won a Betty Trask Award 2019. Cursed Bread was longlisted for the Women's Prize 2023. She has been published in Granta, The White Review and TANK magazine among others.
Review :
A shimmering fever-dream of a novel, teasing the reader [..] while finding a fresh narrative framework for the relationship between monotonous small-town life and repressed female desire. Cursed Bread contains more riches than many a novel twice its length
A quietly rich maturation of Mackintosh's skill... This is a book about the power desire and greed exert over reality and memory... Mackintosh has entered a brilliant new stage of writing
Nimble, terrifying... Mackintosh is a wonderful prose stylist and she uses many of the resources that served her well in her Booker prize-nominated debut, The Water Cure: the slow unravelling of sanity, the isolated and mysterious setting, that feeling of panting, crawling, unfulfilled desire... A dreamy sapphic romp
Remarkable, sensuous, thrillingly written . . . Mackintosh's evocation of desire is so tangible that you can smell the aroma of illicit sex
A richly atmospheric tale of greed, desire and vainglorious ambition, the plot centres around Elodie, wife of the village baker, who projects the wants and desires from her own unfulfilling marriage onto the arrival of two glamorous newcomers to the village... Shimmering with an almost hallucinatory quality throughout, closing its pages at The End feels like waking up from a fever dream. Fascinating.
A sun-scorched fever dream . . . Mackintosh's top-notch phrasemaking and knack for forming uncanny images generate a baleful atmosphere of lust and dread in this splendidly peculiar tale
Sensual, luminous, transcendent... This tale of obsession, desire and betrayal has a timeless, dreamlike quality. It confirms Mackintosh as one of our finest young writers
As in her previous novels, Mackintosh's prose is eerie but minimalist - dreamlike yet grounded. Her style elevates plot to the status of fable or allegory without resorting to straightforward metaphor. This a story shrouded in mist, thick with meaning
This novel is a masterclass in observation, of fracturing personalities but also in its tight and nuanced portrait of the rituals and minutiae of small-town life. Afterwards, you'll want to devour it all over again
Mackintosh's dark imagination and precision as a prose stylist combine to devastating effect, as unsettling as it is unpredictable
Sensual, brilliant... This strange fable takes place in a 20th-century French village (and, remarkably, is based on a true story). It is the sort of tale that you will want to sneak a chapter of at the dinner table before food is served. The book details the progress of a maddening, hot summer... Be warned: you will never look at a boulangerie in the same way again
A thrilling and subversive fable
Distinctive, cool, sparse... An eerie ambiguity fills Cursed Bread
Intoxicating, sumptuous and savage, Cursed Bread has a gothic sensibility that is entirely original. In Mackintosh's hands, the strange, compulsive machinations of desire become luminous and ghastly all at once
Sensuous and haunted, like Madame Bovary reworked as a ghost story - an incredible book about desire, pleasure, beauty. Sophie's fiction always has a gauzy quality, filled with strange, languid images, which rise to a narrative crescendo like clues in a detective novel. She makes it look effortless
Cursed Bread floored me on the first page and didn't let up for the rest of the journey. It always feels like a true privilege to spend time with Sophie Mackintosh's brilliant mind and she is only getting better and weirder and wilder. A knockout
Macabre and sensuous... [It] packs a punch
Her writing is so sleek, the characters mysterious and yet indelible - a taut, seductive, thrilling gem of a novel
Sophie Mackintosh takes a true story and asks what any of us really know about what is true? Our desires poison us. Shame and longing intertwine. We hide even from ourselves... This novel is subtle and devouring; reading it is like being slowly swallowed by the night
Vivid and shocking, written with stunning, incantatory prose, Cursed Bread is the kind of book that upends your nervous system
Bloody, sexy, sinister, strange. This book will take hold of you
Everything Sophie Mackintosh is so febrile and tactile, when you read her books you feel as if you live in them. The world felt so eerie after finishing Cursed Bread. I didn't feel quite the same as I was before, but in the best way
A story of love, lust and appetite . . . a book I haven’t been able to stop thinking about
Pristine, visceral & wild. She's a master. You won't be disappointed
Gorgeously atmospheric and feverishly compulsive [on] amorphous longings and desires, and the hot shame of wanting more than you deserve
Sophie Mackintosh has given her strange and intriguing imagination the opportunity to flourish. There is tension on every page
A thrilling and feverish fable of secret desire
PRAISE FOR BLUE TICKET: 'Its cool intensity and strange beauty is a wonder - be sure to read everything Sophie Mackintosh writes'
