But I’ve always been fascinated by stories of mass hysteria, and so I kept returning to it over the years, and gradually the characters started to take shape for me – in the end, I wrote a completely fictional imagining, not retelling the event as it happened, but using this idea of a town’s reality turned upside down as a springboard to explore ideas of desire, truth, obsession and narrative.Īre there any locations that have a special connection for you or your book? It was never definitively solved, with theories ranging from ergot poisoning in the flour (the most likely) to CIA mind control experiments with LSD (less likely, but the theory that gripped me!) I heard about the story and thought it was interesting but filed it away. It’s based on the true story of the Pont St Esprit mass poisoning in 1951 – called ‘Le Pain Maudit’ (literally Cursed Bread), where an entire town was struck down by hallucinations. Describe your novel in one sentence as if you were telling a friend.Ĭursed Bread is centred around a bored baker’s wife in a small French town in the 1950s, who becomes progressively more obsessed with a new and glamorous couple, all set against the backdrop of a real-life and unsolved mass poisoning event that caused the inhabitants of the town to suffer violent hallucinations.
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