Sophie Mackintosh is the author of three novels- The Water Cure, Blue Ticket and Cursed Bread. Her debut novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018 and won a Betty Trask Award 2019. Cursed Bread was longlisted for the Women's Prize 2023. She has been published in Granta, The White Review and TANK magazine among others.
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*
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*
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*
Remarkable, sensuous, thrillingly written . . . Mackintosh's
evocation of desire is so tangible that you can smell the aroma of
illicit sex
*Observer*
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*
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*
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*
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*
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*
Mackintosh's dark imagination and precision as a prose stylist
combine to devastating effect, as unsettling as it is
unpredictable
*Financial Times*
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 thrilling and subversive fable
*i-D*
Distinctive, cool, sparse... An eerie ambiguity fills Cursed
Bread
*i*
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'*
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'*
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'*
Macabre and sensuous... [It] packs a punch
*Mail on Sunday*
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'*
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'*
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*
Bloody, sexy, sinister, strange. This book will take hold of
you
*Saba Sams, author of 'Send Nudes'*
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 story of love, lust and appetite . . . a book I haven’t been able
to stop thinking about
*The Spectator 'Best Books of 2023'*
Pristine, visceral & wild. She's a master. You won't be
disappointed
*Sarah Rose Etter, author of 'The Book of X'*
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'*
Sophie Mackintosh has given her strange and intriguing imagination
the opportunity to flourish. There is tension on every page
*Prospect*
A thrilling and feverish fable of secret desire
*Monocle*
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