Cursed Bread

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER
WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION NOMINEE
GRANTA BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 2023

From the Booker Prize-nominated author of The Water Cure comes a chilling new feminist fable based on the true story of an unsolved mystery…

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. A plain, unremarkable woman, ignored by her husband and underestimated by her neighbours, she burns with the secret desire to be extraordinary. One day a charismatic new couple appear in town–the ambassador and his sharp-toothed wife, Violet–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 coded conversations, longing to be part of their world.

Meanwhile, beneath the tranquil surface of daily life, strange things are happening. Six horses are found dead in a sun-drenched field, laid out neatly on the ground like an offering. Widows see their lost husbands walking up the moonlit river, coming back to claim them. 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 fevered confession, an entry into memory’s hall of mirrors, a fable of obsession and transformation. Sophie Mackintosh spins a darkly gleaming tale of a town gripped by hysteria, envy like poison in the blood, and desire that burns and consumes.*NATIONAL BESTSELLER*
*LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION*

Best Book of the Month: The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Book Riot, CrimeReads

One of
Lit Hub’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2023”
Good Housekeeping’s “15 Most-Anticipated Books of 2023” 
Our Culture Magazine’s “Most Anticipated Books of 2023”
Los Angeles Times‘ “10 books to add to your reading list in April”
Esquire’s “Best Books of Spring 2023”
The Guardian‘s “Five of the best books about gossip”

“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.”
—Alexandra Kleeman, author of Something New Under the Sun and You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine

“Vivid and shocking, written with stunning, incantatory prose, Cursed Bread is the kind of book that upends your nervous system.”
—Julia May Jonas, author of Vladimir

“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.”
―Megan Nolan, author of Acts of Desperation

“[I]mpossible to put down. . . . a vividly compelling take of obsession, pleasure, and fear. . . . Desire and pain—the kind that unseats us, the kind that rearranges us—run like a current through the book.”
—Heidi Sopinka, author of Utopia and The Dictionary of Animal Languages

“I devoured Cursed Bread. A stunning take on obsession, manipulation, and desire—a feverish what-if of a novel.”
—Leah Mol, author of Sharp Edges

“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

“This sharp fable explores the power desire and envy exert over reality and memory. . . . [Mackintosh] has entered a brilliant new stage of writing.”
—The Guardian

“Cursed Bread is a gorgeously atmospheric and feverishly compulsive novel about amorphous longings and desires, and the hot shame of wanting more than you deserve.”
—Lara Williams, author of Supper Club and The Odyssey

“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.”
—Jo Hamya, author of Three Rooms

“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.”
—Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of Starling Days

“Based on the unsolved mystery of a mass poisoning in 1951, this wonderfully weird book sees the residents of a small town lose their collective minds. Some say it’s spoiled bread, some say it’s a government conspiracy, but whatever the cause, mass hysteria has everyone vibrating at a fever pitch. And then an alluring new couple arrives in town, and things escalate even further. You’ll just have to read to see what I mean.”
—Lizz Schumer, for Good Housekeeping

“Her writing is so sleek, the characters mysterious and yet indelible – a taut, seductive, thrilling gem of a novel.”
―Olivia Sudjic, author of Asylum Road

“Bloody, sexy, sinister, strange. This book will take hold of you.”
―Saba Sams, author of Send Nudes

“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.”
―Annie Lord, author of Notes on Heartbreak

“Pristine, visceral & wild. She’s a master. You won’t be disappointed.”
―Sarah Rose Etter, author of The Book of X

“Mackintosh’s dark imagination and precision as a prose stylist combine to devastating effect . . . . Dreamlike.”
—Financial Times

“This shimmering fever-dream of a novel . . . [offers] a fresh narrative framework for the relationship between monotonous small-town life and repressed female desire. It’s refreshing, too, to find a writer making such powerful use of brevity: at under 200 pages, Cursed Bread contains more riches than many a novel twice its length.”
—The Telegraph

“Nimble, terrifying… Mackintosh is a wonderful prose stylist and she uses many of the resources that served her well in her Booker prizenominated 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

“The incredible stylistic prose of The Water Cure . . . is powerfully at play here once again. There is much to admire on a sentence level and in the author’s ability to immerse the reader in atmospheric other-worldliness. . . . A compelling and curious story.” 
—The Irish Times

“Slipping into Sophie Mackintosh’s fiction is as comforting as it is disquieting. The tender consideration lavished on her characters, especially the women and girls her novels revolve around, is immediately tangible, and yet their worlds, glimpsed as through a gauzy, fractured filter, quiver with unease.”
—Boston GlobeSOPHIE MACKINTOSH is the author of Blue Ticket and The Water Cure, which won the 2019 Betty Trask Award and was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. In 2016 she won the White Review Short Story Prize and the Virago/Stylist short story competition. She has been published in The New York Times, Elle, and Granta, among others.US

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