Brought to you by Penguin.

Hello and welcome to the Penguin podcast where we talk to writers about writing.

I'm Izzy Suttie and today I'm going to be

talking to Sophie McIntosh, whose first novel The Water Cure was long listed for the Booker Prize in

2018. Sophie's latest novel, Cursed Bread, is a mesmerising and chilling story inspired by the true

event of an unsolved mass poisoning. It's been described as a shimmering

fever dream and remarkable, sensuous and thrillingly written. Sophie, it's great to talk to you today.

Welcome to the Penguin or Croiso e Bodle-Diad Penguin. So you are bilingual.

And I'll come on to that later.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, it's really exciting to be here.

So the story of cursed bread, which I really loved, so it's written through the eyes of Elodie, who's a baker's wife in a small town.

And she's married to a husband who doesn't desire her. And found him a really mysterious character he's perfecting his baking and wants to make the perfect loaf of bread

and is um I found him really really interesting character actually and I don't think he's

he doesn't appear as much in it as the main of the three characters, but his presence was felt everywhere

for me. Elodie becomes obsessed with two new arrivals to the community, a woman called Violet and

her husband, who's an American ambassador, and they're quite mysterious and alluring. And this

account of desire is set against the post-World War II backdrop of a true story of a town in France,

point Saint-esprit, where the residents succumbed to a mass poisoning in 1951, which has never

been solved. When did you first encounter the story of the poisoning? It was a few years ago,

and it was one of those things where you know you're kind of

scrolling on Twitter and you're kind of crassinating and I just came across this story. It was like,

...