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11 of the best books set in France

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Books to read if you love Cruel Summer

The books we'll be giving this year. Image: Alicia Fernandes/Penguin

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Penguin.co.uk editors on the books they’ll be giving this year

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Does fiction still need speech marks? A potted history of vanishing punctuation

Writing advice: Tips from those who've learned the hard way

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Writing tips from our bestselling authors

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The Water Cure author Sophie Mackintosh on sisterhood: ‘It is one of the most intense forms of love’

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Blogs

Hermione Thompson talks about The Water Cure

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Reading lists

5 books about cults

Longlisted for the Women’s Prize

Cursed Bread

GRANTA BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELISTS 
 
From the Booker Prize-nominated author of The Water Cure comes a chilling new feminist fable based on the true story of an unsolved mystery . . . 
 
'A shimmering fever-dream of a novel' Telegraph 
 
Spring, 1951. Four people meet in a small French town: the baker and his wife; the ambassador and his wife. Two belong to the town, two are outsiders. 
 
Some time later, strange things start happening. Horses drop dead in the fields. Children grow wild and unbiddable. Ghosts are sighted after dark. Someone is playing a dangerous game of cat and mouse – but who is the predator and who their prey? 
 
Audacious and mesmerizing, Cursed Bread is a darkly erotic mystery about a town gripped by madness, envy like poison in the blood, and desire that burns and consumes. 
 
'A dreamy sapphic romp' The Times 
 
'Gauzy [and] gripping, a quietly rich maturation of Mackintosh's skill' Guardian 
 
The Spectator Book of the Year 2023

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

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

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

Remarkable, sensuous, thrillingly written . . . Mackintosh's evocation of desire is so tangible that you can smell the aroma of illicit sex

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.

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

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

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

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

Mackintosh's dark imagination and precision as a prose stylist combine to devastating effect, as unsettling as it is unpredictable

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

Distinctive, cool, sparse... An eerie ambiguity fills Cursed Bread

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

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

Her writing is so sleek, the characters mysterious and yet indelible - a taut, seductive, thrilling gem of a novel

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

Bloody, sexy, sinister, strange. This book will take hold of you

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

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

Sophie Mackintosh has given her strange and intriguing imagination the opportunity to flourish. There is tension on every page

A thrilling and feverish fable of secret desire

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.

Audacious and mesmerising, Cursed Bread is a darkly erotic tale of a town gripped by madness, envy like poison in the blood, and desire that burns and consumes. 
 
Elodie is the baker's wife: plain and unremarkable but desperate to escape her dull, small-town life. One day a charismatic new couple appear in the neighbourhood and Elodie quickly falls under their spell. All summer long she stalks them through the shining streets: inviting herself into their home, eavesdropping on their conversations, longing to possess them. 
 
Meanwhile, beneath the tranquil surface of daily life, strange things are happening. The animals expire in the fields, ghosts are sighted after dark, the local children grow erratic and violent. A dark intoxication is spreading through the town, and when Elodie finally understands her role in it, it will be too late to stop.

Blue Ticket

From the author longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Women's Prize for Fiction and selected as one of the Best Young British Novelists of the Decade: 
 
An unsettling and addictive feminist fable for fans of Hot Milk, Unsettled Ground and Klara and the Sun 
 
Recommended by Stylist, Evening Standard, Esquire, Red, Daily Mail, Oprah Magazine, LitHub, and Belletrist Book Club 
 
'Be sure to read everything Sophie Mackintosh writes' Deborah Levy 
 
'Definitely don't miss the return of Sophie Mackintosh' Stylist 
 
Calla knows how the lottery works. Everyone does. On the day of your first bleed, you report to the lottery station to learn what kind of woman you will be. A white ticket grants you children. A blue ticket grants you freedom. You are relieved of the terrible burden of choice. Or, to put it another way, you have no choice. And once you've taken your ticket, there is no going back. 
 
But what if the life you're given is the wrong one? 
 
Blue Ticket is a devastating enquiry into free will and the fraught space of motherhood. Bold and chilling, it pushes beneath the skin of female identity and patriarchal violence, to the point where human longing meets our animal bodies. 
 
'Dreamlike, tense, compelling, [with] a pitch-perfect ending' The New York Times 
 
'Gripping, ethereal, atmospheric' Sunday Times 
 
'Thoughtful and haunting' Observer 
 
'Terrifying and enchanting in equal measure' LitHub 
 
'Blue Ticket will worms its way under your skin and haunt your dreams' Red

Definitely don't miss the return of Sophie Mackintosh... Blue Ticket gets to the root of women's ambivalence and confusion around becoming mothers set against an unsettling dystopia; she's amazing

Dreamlike, tense, compelling... Blue Ticket adds something new to the dystopian tradition set by Orwell's 1984 or Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale... Piercing moments of wisdom and insight drive toward a pitch-perfect ending

The cool intensity and strange beauty of Blue Ticket is a wonder - be sure to read everything Sophie Mackintosh writes

Even more hallucinatory and spiralled than her first [novel]... Terrifying and enchanting in equal measure

Lit Hub, Best New Books to Read This Summer

The Handmaid's Tale as told by David Lynch... A bona fide chase narrative as well as a polyvalent, dream-like allegory of pregnancy and bodily change - not to mention the vortex of judgement that surrounds womanhood... Mackintosh is part of an exciting generation of writers, including Daisy Johnson and Julia Armfield... Blue Ticket stands apart from the crowd

One of the most disquieting novels I've read in a long time, Blue Ticket will worms its way under your skin and haunt your dreams

Gripping, ethereal, atmospheric... Mackintosh handles haziness deliberately and with poise, demonstrating the near impossibility of trying to articulate or rationalise maternal desire

Mackintosh writes with a language drawn from the body.... Impressionistic and haunting in equal measure

Visceral, primal, striking... This is a potent exploration of biology and agency, motherhood and childlessness, which confirms [Mackintosh] as a writer of note

Mackintosh is part of a new generation of female writers creating feminist fictions that relate uncannily to our dystopian times... [Her] fiction lives, to an unusual extent, in its musicality, in the rhythm and spareness of its sentences

For anyone currently waiting with bated breath for the new season of 'The Handmaid's Tale', Booker-longlisted author Sophie Mackintosh's new novel is a feminist dystopia to quench your thirst

A thoughtful and haunting exploration of freedom, fate and a woman's right to choose her destiny

Chilling, timely, thought-provoking

[Mackintosh] writes with an ethereal lyricism that is equally capable of fragility and violence

Blue Ticket offers a completely different angle on a familiar subject... Like all good speculative fiction, [it] reminds us of a truth in the real world

A compelling, unsettling tale... Part-horror, part thriller, and part pregnant-lesbian love story

A dark fable... Mackintosh sensitively conveys resonant questions about motherhood, female solidarity, queer love, and bodily autonomy

Cool, disturbing, it deals with emotionally fraught material. Mackintosh traffics in ambivalence and ambiguity... What Calla really wants, the author shows us, isn't necessarily a baby; it's an answer

A spare, haunting tale of autonomy and free will

Both claustrophobic and expansive, dream-like and heart-stoppingly tense. You will want to languish in its world for a very long time

This book left me breathless - it is gloriously subversive in its exploration of motherhood and desire. I'll be pressing it on everyone

Strange and luminous, spare and precise... A thrilling exploration of what it means to follow one's own longing to the point of destruction and beyond

Utterly exquisite - clever and brilliant and heartbreaking. From the dusty road to the salving forest, I absolutely adored it

Emma Jane Unsworth, author of 'Adults' and 'Animals'

Chilling, haunting, heartbreaking... Mackintosh brings a new sense of pathos to the dystopian novel... A moving and original meditation on freedom, fate, and women's rage

A dreamlike exploration of free will and desire

A must for Handmaid's Tale aficionados

Powerful, Ishiguro-esque... Sophie Mackintosh lays bare many of the fears and realities that face any society's women as they contemplate when their choices begin, and where they might end

Told with ragged prose that catches the breath, [Blue Ticket] articulates the irrepressible desires and wounds that can lie deep within, marked by a claustrophobia that never stops pressing in from the margins. This unsettling reimagining of the anxieties and pressures around motherhood lays bare the alienation that comes when your body is not truly yours

A darkly brilliant allegory... Astute, revelatory and heartbreaking

Heather O’Neill, author of 'The Lonely Hearts Hotel'

A rich, sharp, and daring book. To read Blue Ticket is to feel so vigorously alert you can feel the world turning

Heidi Sopinka, author of 'The Dictionary of Animal Languages'

Mackintosh poses urgent questions about social expectations and free will that are relevant to all realities

Calla knows how the lottery works. Everyone does. On the day of your first bleed, you report to the station to learn what kind of woman you will be. A white ticket grants you children. A blue ticket grants you freedom. You are relieved of the terrible burden of choice. And, once you've taken your ticket, there is no going back. 
 
But what if the life you're given is the wrong one? 
 
Blue Ticket is a devastating enquiry into free will and the fraught space of motherhood. Bold and chilling, it pushes beneath the skin of female identity and patriarchal violence, to the point where human longing meets our animal bodies.

LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2018

The Water Cure

BRITISH VOGUE 'STAR OF THE FUTURE' 
 
INDEPENDENT BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE 
 
'A gripping, sinister fable' Margaret Atwood (via Twitter) 
 
'An extraordinary debut - otherworldly, luminous, precise' Guardian 
 
'Bold, inventive, haunting... With shades of Margaret Atwood and Eimear McBride, you'll be bowled over by it' Stylist 
 
Grace, Lia and Sky live in an abandoned hotel, on a sun-bleached island, beside a poisoned sea. Their parents raised them there to keep them safe, to make them good. The world beyond the water is contaminated and men are the contamination. But one day three strangers wash ashore - men who stare at the sisters hungrily, helplessly. Men who bring trouble. 
 
This ebook edition includes an exclusive extract from Sophie Mackintosh's gripping second novel, Blue Ticket, which is out now. 
 
***** 
 
'A feminist fable set by the sea, a female Lord of the Flies. It felt like a book I'd been waiting to read for a long time' Emma Jane Unsworth 
 
'Visceral, hypnotic, with one of my favourite endings I've read in a long while' The Pool 
 
'An unsettling dark fantasy... [It] lingers long after the final page' Daily Telegraph

Compulsive, eerily gorgeous, [it] will have you gripped until the end... A film adaptation feels inevitable... As far as debuts go, this is superb

A feminist dystopian fairy tale, a sexual coming-of-age story and a survival-of-the-fittest tale. Evocative, suspenseful and bleak - in short, everything this age seems to be demanding

[An] eerie, uncanny literary debut... Beautifully written, pared down and hypnotic

Bewitching... [An] ambiguous utopia

In raw, visceral prose, Mackintosh probes at ideas of the threat of male violence, the ways women are told to protect ourselves, love and sisterhood and survival. A hypnotic, stormy book, with one of my favourite endings I've read in a long while

Stunning... A haunting story of abuse, death, and desire... Chilling and topical, a breathtaking debut

Eerily beautiful, this strange, unsettling novel creeps up and grabs hold of you

Paula Hawkins, author of 'The Girl on the Train'

Darkly gratifying, dreamy, primal, and arresting [as] a fairy tale... The overgrown grounds, with their perimeter of rusty barbed wire and shark-infested waters, resemble Sleeping Beauty's castle

Searing, richly drawn, eerily compelling... As foreboding in what it holds back as in what it reveals

Elemental... [A] utopia portrayed in spectral, organic prose... Mackintosh is a wonderful stylist; the full scope of her imagination, as well as the cohesion of her vision, is evident on every page... A seriously impressive feat

[A] wildly confident debut... Take the strange social ceremonies of The Lobster and the pheromone-rich claustrophobia of The Beguiled and you come close to the world Sophie Mackintosh conjures

The Water Cure is eerily still and pure - with saline bite... Mackintosh asks if it is the traumas of our pasts that ultimately pose the greatest threat to our futures

Powerfully unsettling, immensely assured, calmly devastating. It conjures a world both alien and familiar, exploring the physical and psychological cruelties enacted on women, by men, in the name of their protection, and the noble and ignoble uses to which anger can be put in a perverse world. This is a gem of a novel, and I was bowled over by it

Electric [and] beautifully strange... Her novel is an exercise in minimalism

A hypnotic read... This extraordinary debut is a feminist, quasi-dystopian read - great for fans of Hot Milk, The Girls and The Vegetarian

A work of cool, claustrophobic beauty. Sophie Mackintosh writes devastatingly well about the complexities that women face in loving men, and in loving each other

Eli Goldstone, author of 'Strange Heart Beating'

Uneasy, mythic, lawless... The atmospheric landscapes cloak trauma and violence in wisps of uncertainty, where bad feelings coalesce as both presciently felt and strangely unknowable

Otherworldly, brutal and poetic: a feminist fable set by the sea, a utopia gone awry, a female Lord of the Flies. It transported me, savaged me, filled me with hope and fear. It felt like a book I'd been waiting to read for a long time

[A] lyrical debut, original and very atmospheric

Eerie, electric, beautiful. It rushes you through to the end on a tide of tension and closely held panic. I loved this book

Creepy and delightful, a portrayal of post-apocalyptic puberty, intermingling desire and despair. It has a pinch of Shirley Jackson, a dash of chlorine, and an essence all of its own

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, author of 'Harmless Like You'

Powerful, mythic, seductively sinister... Her alternative world is as carefully imagined as one of Margaret Atwood's... [Sophie Mackintosh] is a writer to be reckoned with

Eerie and unsettling, the novel exerts a hypnotic grip as the tension builds

The Water Cure deserves a Sofia Coppola-style big-screen treatment, although its cultish overtones and sinister denouement are as reminiscent of The Wicker Man as The Virgin Suicides

You are a girl. Your body is vulnerable. Men will break it if they can - and out there, they absolutely can. 
 
Suffering will prepare you for the worst. The cure is nothing compared to what you've been spared in the sickness. It takes a lot of love to hurt you like this. 
 
Now, come outside. It's time to play the drowning game.

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