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.

In Cursed Bread, Sophie Mackintosh shows off her capacity to craft beguiling sentences and evoke an atmosphere of shadowy obscurity that might generously be described as Kafkaesque. But she does ...

In her deliciously ardent new novel, “Cursed Bread,” men again take steps to proscribe women’s actions, but their restrictions are subordinate to women insistently exploring the ...