Cursed Bread

From the Booker-nominated author of The Water Cure - an eerie historical mystery about desire, memory and madnessAudacious and mesmerising, Cursed Bread is a darkly erotic tale of a town gripped by madness, envy like poison in the blood, and desire that burns and consumes.Elodie is the baker's wife- plain and unremarkable but desperate to escape her dull, small-town life. One day a charismatic new couple appear in the neighbourhood and Elodie quickly falls under their spell. All summer long she stalks them through the shining streets- inviting herself into their home, eavesdropping on their conversations, longing to possess them.Meanwhile, beneath the tranquil surface of daily life, strange things are happening. The animals expire in the fields, ghosts are sighted after dark, the local children grow erratic and violent. A dark intoxication is spreading through the town, and when Elodie finally understands her role in it, it will be too late to stop.

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 Telegraph
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 Guardian
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 The Times
Remarkable, sensuous, thrillingly written . . . Mackintosh's evocation of desire is so tangible that you can smell the aroma of illicit sex Observer
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. Marie Claire
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 Daily Mail
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 The Bookseller, Editor's Choice
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 New Statesman
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 Independent
Mackintosh's dark imagination and precision as a prose stylist combine to devastating effect, as unsettling as it is unpredictable Financial Times

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.

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