Book Review: Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh

My Rating:⭐⭐⭐⭐

“Pain becomes an animal, walking at your side. Pain becomes a home you can carry with you.”

A fictional take on the 1951 mass poisoning of the small French village of Pont Saint Esprit, Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh is an atmospheric, complex and hypotonic novel that reeled me in and kept me hooked till the very last page. The end will leave you a tad unsettled but I guess that is the author’s intention. Stunning prose, flawed characters, and uneven structure create a claustrophobic yet gripping reading experience.

The story revolves around Elodie, presently widowed wife of a village baker who recounts the events leading up to a mass tragedy that occurred in her village. Elodie, the baker’s wife leads a monotonous life, selling bread, gossiping with the other village women while washing clothes and being ignored by her husband whose passion for baking was markedly more pronounced than his romantic interest in his wife. The arrival of a new couple, the affluent Ambassador and his wife Violet, create ripples in the village. Elodie is taken with Violet, and though initially, Violet ignores Elodie’s attempts at engaging her in conversation, Violet and the Ambassador befriend Elodie and her husband. The story is presented to us in flashbacks from the perspective of Elodie with an epistolary element in the form of letters she addresses to Violet interspersed throughout the narrative. The novel primarily revolves around the complicated dynamic between Elodie and Violet, or more precisely Elodie’s obsession with Violet – she oscillates between awe and envy and as the narrative progresses her sense of reality blurs. Much of this stems from her monotonous life and lack of physical intimacy with her husband. Violet’s motivations are initially unclear - she claims to be lonely, and shares intimate details of her relationship with the Ambassador alternating between treating Elodie like a confidante and at times being deliberately elusive creating an aura of mystery that confuses Elodie and further fuels her obsession, leaving her susceptible to both Violet’s and the Ambassador’s manipulations.

“I picture you sometimes as a set of Russian dolls, each layer revealing nothing except a tiny, weaker version of yourself, at the end only hollowness. You made yourself a character in your own story, at least as much as I made you a character in mine. Now it’s impossible to know what I was told and what I created.”

This is my first Sophie Mackintosh novel and I look forward to reading more of her work in the future. Many thanks to author Sophie Mackintosh, Doubleday Books and NetGalley for the digital review copy of this novel. This novel is due to be released on April 4, 2023.

“I think about how desire grows in the spaces around the known, where things are at their most and least real, where the terror of all the possibilities fracturing out through our lives is suspended, momentarily, so we can look them in the eye for once, and isn’t that what we are searching for when we debase ourselves for love, one moment of certainty in this strange and beautiful world.”