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 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 ...

In the intense but muddled latest from Mackintosh (Cursed Bread), a pent-up woman falls for a set of newcomers to her remote French village a few years after WWII. The narrator, 30-something ...

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.

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 ...