Ambiguity also lies at the heart of Sophie Mackintosh’s novel Cursed Bread. Elodie, a baker’s wife, becomes obsessed with the glamorous new couple who move into her town: the ambassador and Violet.

Cursed Bread Sophie Mackintosh. Doubleday, $28 (208p) ISBN 978-0-385-54830-4. In the intense but muddled latest from Mackintosh (Cursed Bread), a pent-up woman falls for a set of newcomers to her ...

In her dreamlike third novel, which is narrated by Elodie, the plain and overlooked wife of a baker, bread represents the opposite of goodness. At the beginning of Cursed Bread, a stark warning is ...

A good writer can write a bad book, but that doesn’t mean we have to forgive them for it. In Cursed Bread, Sophie Mackintosh shows off her capacity to craft beguiling sentences and evoke an ...

The novel is inspired by real-life events in the summer of 1951, when the French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit “succumbed to a mass poisoning,” leading to death, madness, and violence.