Cursed Bread

BRITISH VOGUE 'STAR OF THE FUTURE'<BR><BR>INDEPENDENT BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE<BR><BR>'A gripping, sinister fable' Margaret Atwood<BR><BR>'An extraordinary debut - otherworldly, luminous, precise' Guardian<BR><BR>'Bold, inventive, haunting . . . With shades of Margaret Atwood and Eimear McBride, you'll be bowled over by it' Stylist<BR><BR>A hypnotic coming-of-age story for fans of The Power, The Vegetarian, I Who Have Never Known Men and The Girls<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>*****<BR><BR>'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<BR><BR>'Visceral, hypnotic, with one of my favourite endings I've read in a long while' The Pool<BR><BR>'An unsettling dark fantasy... [It] lingers long after the final page' Daily Telegraph

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:<BR><BR>An unsettling and addictive feminist fable for fans of I Who Have Never Known Men, Hot Milk, Unsettled Ground and Klara and the Sun <BR><BR>Recommended by Stylist, Evening Standard, Esquire, Red, Daily Mail, Oprah Magazine, LitHub, and Belletrist Book Club<BR><BR>'Be sure to read everything Sophie Mackintosh writes' Deborah Levy<BR><BR>'Definitely don't miss the return of Sophie Mackintosh' Stylist<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>But what if the life you're given is the wrong one?<BR><BR>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.<BR><BR>'Dreamlike, tense, compelling, [with] a pitch-perfect ending' The New York Times<BR><BR>'Gripping, ethereal, atmospheric' Sunday Times<BR><BR>'Thoughtful and haunting' Observer<BR><BR>'Terrifying and enchanting in equal measure' LitHub<BR><BR>'Blue Ticket will worms its way under your skin and haunt your dreams' Red

One of the most anticipated books of 2026 as chosen by: Vogue, Stylist, Forbes, Oprah Daily and LitHub<BR><BR>'Like Severance for relationships' Oprah Daily<BR><BR>'Sophie Mackintosh turns the novel of adultery inside out' Lauren Elkin<BR><BR>'It will stay with me for a long time' Monica Heisey<BR><BR>This is the story of an affair. Clara and Francis are in love, but nobody knows it. For months they have been slipping away from their respective lives, sharing stolen afternoons in hotel rooms, their time together painfully sweet and all too short. Until one day they wake up in a bedroom neither of them recognises with no memory of how they got there.<BR><BR>They find themselves in a strange and unfamiliar city: a place where adulterers can live openly as couples, without fear of consequence, putting the theory of their love into practice. Here the sky is painted over the old town square in changeless, cloudless blue. Ripe fruits wait on the table each morning and the sunset comes down in a blaze of pink each night. And contact with the real world is impossible. As long as Clara and Francis are here, they only have each other.<BR><BR>How do you know when you've found true love? How much would you sacrifice to keep hold of it? And how long can you stay in paradise before the cracks start to show?<BR><BR>From the Booker Prize-nominated author of The Water Cure and Cursed Bread comes an intoxicating modern love story. Permanence is a thrillingly erotic and sharply relatable portrait of longing and obsession, intimacy and betrayal, possession and dispossession.