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 ...

Cursed Bread is about desire and the ways it can lead people to betray others and themselves. At times, Mackintosh creates erotic tension in a style that feels deliberately overdone and wouldn’t ...

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.