Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh: book review

Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh (2023) is set in a small village in France in 1951 with a population of about 4,000.

The novel is based upon a true event in the town in southern France called Point-Saint-Esprit – which means the Holy Spirit Bridge. On 15 August 1951, more than 250 people were affected by an outbreak of poisoning with psychotic symptoms. Subsequently, four people died and about 50 were institutionalized in an asylum. Many theories arose about the source of the poisoning, but none were proven.

This novel is loosely a fictional account of the poisoning event.

The narrator Elodie, of an unknown age, is the wife of a baker of an unknown name. He bakes the bread, and she sells it.

For conversation, she meets the women of the town at the local laundry to wash their clothes. There, she befriends Violet.

Violet, of an unknown age, is the wife of a wealthy ambassador of an unknown name. He conducts official business and she accompanies him wearing fine clothes.

The two couples lead complicated entangled lives kneaded together with lies, deceit, obsession, flirting, and flaunting.

Then people succumb to poisoning. Horses die. Strange things occur. There is much speculation about who or what is poisoning the townsfolk – ghosts, water, air, a person. Gossip spreads that the baker’s rye bread is cursed.

This is an easy-to-read, well-paced, mystery novel that rolls along – not too intellectual and not too dumbed down – it’s like slowly rising dough.

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MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009). She lives in Paris.

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