Cursed Bread

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'

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 '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

Gorgeously atmospheric and feverishly compulsive [on] amorphous longings and desires, and the hot shame of wanting more than you deserve

Lara Williams, author of 'Supper Club'

Bloody, sexy, sinister, strange. This book will take hold of you

Saba Sams, author of 'Send Nudes'

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'

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'

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

Pristine, visceral & wild. She's a master. You won't be disappointed

Sarah Rose Etter, author of 'The Book of X'

A thrilling and subversive fable

i-D

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'

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

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

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

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

Sophie Mackintosh has given her strange and intriguing imagination the opportunity to flourish. There is tension on every page

Prospect

Distinctive, cool, sparse... An eerie ambiguity fills Cursed Bread

i

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

Remarkable, sensuous, thrillingly written . . . Mackintosh's evocation of desire is so tangible that you can smell the aroma of illicit sex

Observer

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

A thrilling and feverish fable of secret desire

Monocle

Mackintosh's dark imagination and precision as a prose stylist combine to devastating effect, as unsettling as it is unpredictable

Financial Times

Macabre and sensuous... [It] packs a punch

Mail on Sunday

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

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

Daily Telegraph (Summer Reads)

A story of love, lust and appetite . . . a book I haven’t been able to stop thinking about

The Spectator 'Best Books of 2023'