Mackintosh takes as her source material the 1951 mass poisoning of a small French town, in which over 250 people were driven to madness or death. It is to this day the subject of conspiracy theories: was it a freak accident caused by some naturally occurring contaminant to the village’s bread, or was the town subject to a biochemical experiment by foreign forces? From this tragic historical footnote, she spins a darkly erotic tale of obsession, identity, perception and transformation. Dizzyingly atmospheric and heavy with the threat of violence, but also coldly voyeuristic and almost bursting its seams with unfulfilled desire, Mackintosh’s luminous, sensuous, hallucinatory prose grabs you by the throat from page one and doesn’t let go until the very end. A Guardian review of her Booker longlisted debut, ‘The Water Cure’, said “She is writing the way Sofia Coppola would shoot the end of the world: everything is luminous, precise, otherworldly”, and that absolutely chimes with our experience of ‘Cursed Bread’. We experience the events of the novel as if through a haze of smoke or gauzy fabric, everything is shifting and sun-spotted, and the ground underfoot is never quite firm. We are in awe of how Mackintosh wields her language to create such intense and immediate physical and emotional reactions. It’s uncomfortable but thrilling, like the stomach-flip of a rollercoaster, the sensation is not exactly pleasant but as soon as it’s over you want to go back for more. Beyond the atmospherics and literary fireworks, there are interesting ideas here about identity and control, truth and perception, about personal agency and responsibility, and some wider themes about the way powerful nations (and individuals) view and treat communities (and individuals) recovering from trauma, whether pity is dehumanising, or even cruel. If you've never read any Sophie Mackintosh before, I urge you to try the bread! What’s the worst that could happen?

This book made me think of some Middle Age chronicles that talk about what happened when people ate food mixed with ergot. It's a strange story but it's also a fascinating story and I loved the style of writing. A fascinating story, recommended. Many thanks to the publisher for this arc, all opinions are mine

In a small French town shortly following the second world war, Elodie, the baker's wife, finds herself lonely and desperate to feel alive, to feel passion or love. When an American ambassador and his wife, Violet, move into town from the big city, Elodie becomes infatuated with both of them and strange things soon start happening to their neighbours. The Water Cure was probably my favourite book of 2018 (one of the best for books of recent years). I adore Mackintosh's sensual, visceral and visual style. In CURSED BREAD, she uses this again to swallow us into the world of Elodie, driven half-mad by a dreary and isolating existence and a husband who will barely look at her, let alone touch her. As the book's title suggests, this seemingly quiet and unassuming town has long suffered from a darkness bubbling beneath its surface; ever since the horrors its inhabitants witnessed in the war. The arrival of Violet and the Ambassador merely helps drag some of this out into the open. Likewise, Elodie and her husband have been keeping sordid secrets from each other long before her obsession with Violet began. Through her third novel, Mackintosh explores humankind's need to be seen, to be touched and to have one's existence acknowledged. This need is so strong, we will choose humiliation and cruelty over being ignored. CURSED BREAD asks how far we will go, to feel alive. Elodie is a woman living in a world (and a marriage) that shames her for feeling lust and desire, that tries to surpress these feelings (sound familiar?). As the novel goes on, we see how dangerous the consequences of this can be. Mackintosh explores these complex issues in just 181 pages (compared to The Water Cure's 248). I do feel like this resulted in a slightly rushed ending and would have preferred a slower reveal of what's causing the strange goings on in the town. Another intelligent and thought-provoking work from Sophie Mackintosh. Even though the structure didn't have me 100% and I didn't love the novel as much as The Water Cure, I was gripped by the themes, style and turn of phrase and Mackintosh has cemented herself as a must-read for me.

More than the poisoning, the capturing element of this novel is the main character Elodie's obsessive behaviour and longing for a life that wasn't her own. The intensity of her wants and how far she was willing to go to understand herself and the world she had no part in is brilliant and awful. I took a star off because I wanted to know more about the bread!

Cursed Bread takes a real incident of mass-poisoning and builds a story of sex, repression, and obsession around it. Mackintosh tells her story through the eyes of a baker's wife in a small French village in the wake of some kind of disaster of which she is one of the few sane survivors, twinning a retrospective narrative of what led to the disaster with the present life of the woman in its wake. The claustrophobia of the novel is enhanced by this sense of impending doom, and by the sense of the lasting marks of the horror on the narrator; but those marks are as much a result of the events leading up to the disaster as the disaster itself. The way Mackintosh tells of her increasing obsession with the ambassador and his glamorous wife, newly arrived in the village, and the way she is drawn into their strange and darkly intense relationship, is powerfully effective, with a sense of building inevitability to catastrophe; and the way the narrator observes the follies and failings of her community is smartly done, especially with the late reveals of the ways she has left her own self vulnerable. The writing is sharp and beautiful, and the sense of ongoing loss and longing really brilliantly conveyed. A dark, claustrophobic read, and an intoxicating and intensely sexual book.