Hamish Hamilton seizes Mackintosh's 'audacious and mesmerising' third novel

Hamish Hamilton has acquired Cursed Bread, an "enthralling" new novel by Booker-nominated author Sophie Mackintosh.

Commissioning editor Hermione Thompson bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Harriet Moore at David Higham Associates, to publish in hardback and e-book in spring 2023. Margo Shickmanter of Doubleday acquired US rights, and Deborah Sun De La Cruz at Penguin Canada acquired Canadian rights from Grainne Fox at Fletcher & Co.

Set in 1951 in Pont-Saint-Esprit, a small French town whose residents succumbed to a mass poisoning believed to be the result of spoiled bread or a covert government operation, the novel follows "plain, unremarkable" Elodie, the baker's wife.

"When a charismatic new couple arrived in town — the forceful ambassador and his sharp-toothed wife, Violet — Elodie was quickly drawn into their orbit," the synopsis reads. "Thus began a dangerous game of cat and mouse – but who was the predator and on whom did they prey?

"Audacious and mesmerising, Cursed Bread is a fevered confession, an entry into memory’s hall of mirrors, a fable of obsession and transformation. Sophie Mackintosh spins a darkly gleaming tale of a town gripped by hysteria, envy like poison in the blood, and desire that burns and consumes."

Thompson said: "Sophie Mackintosh is that rare thing: an exceptional literary writer who also stretches and reshapes the possibilities of genre fiction. Infused with the same dream-like sensibility that characterises all her writing, this latest novel is an enthralling, morally ambiguous examination of trauma, desire and the permeable boundary between reality and unreality. It electrified me and left me disarrayed, surfacing for air with a gasp."

Mackintosh is the author of two novels, The Water Cure and Blue Ticket (both Hamish Hamilton). Her first novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2018 and won a Betty Trask Award 2019. She has been a writer in residence with Gladstone’s Library, Prague’s City of Literature and the Paris Writer’s Residency, and her work has been published in the New York Times, Granta, the White Review, Stinging Fly, TANK, Inque and others, and has won the White Review Short Story Prize and the Virago/Stylist Short Story Competition.

"I'm thrilled to be working with Hamish Hamilton once more, which has published my previous novels so brilliantly and with such care at every step of the process," she said. "Being encouraged to develop and explore your directions as a writer is so creatively invigorating, and I'm very happy that this strange fever dream of a novel has found a home alongside my first two."