BOOKS OF THE WEEK
Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh Hamish Hamilton, £16.99 (ebook £9.99) Review by Hannah Colby
A vivid and visceral account of a postwar
French village and its sudden descent into the grip of madness, Cursed Bread is a dark and fevered journey through the mind and memories of Elodie, the wife of the village baker who longs for the taste of freedom and desire. The arrival of the ambassador and his wife provokes a stir among the locals – and a stirring of something deeper in Elodie – but the exotic strangers are not as they first appear. 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.
Old Babes In The Wood by Margaret Atwood Chatto & Windus, £22 (ebook £11.99) Review by Sophie Wingate
The latest collection of short fiction by iconic author Margaret Atwood is bookended by two stories following married couple Nell and Tig across the decades. The middle consists of unconnected short stories on a range of sometimes peculiar subjects, including a snail soul finding itself in a woman’s body, an interview with the late George Orwell through a medium, and an alien attempting to tell human fairytales. While each is interesting in its own right and Atwood’s imagination and mastery of storytelling is evident, it feels like a haphazard assortment that does not always meet the standard of her other works.
The Curator by Owen King Hodder & Stoughton, £20 (ebook £11.99) Review by Rachel Howdle
There has been a rise in gothic-style novels recently, and Owen King’s offering promises to be a Dickensian fantasy that will draw the reader in – an alternate universe full of thieves and conjurers. What you actually get is a rambling tale with very little focus. In a similar vein to Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, there is a grotesqueness to proceedings. However, rather than leaning into the main characters, new ones are added and then just as quickly dropped. The main character Dora is a maid at The National Museum of the Worker, a place filled with wax figures of jobs from the past. She gets very little respect from those around her – or the author, as at no point will you feel anything for this character.
The Earth Transformed: An Untold History by Peter Frankopan Bloomsbury Publishing, £20 Review by Joshua Pugh Ginn
Climate change is the defining challenge of our age, although historian Peter Frankopan suggests this is true of every age: it is the scale and cause that are uniquely modern. The Earth Transformed argues history is the competition between humans and nature, though Frankopan avoids simplistic soundbites about certain climatic events causing the collapse or rise of certain empires. Frankopan hits his stride when mustering his extensive sources around a cohesive theme: explaining how ancient kingship focused on controlling nature, or describing the growth of global trade networks. It’s a comprehensive work of scholarship, but not easy reading.