October 2024 - Blog Posts

Notes on an Execution || Danya Kukafka ★★★★★ Started: 11.10.2024 Finished: 20.10.2024 Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he’s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn’t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. He hoped it wouldn’t end like this, not for him. Through a kaleidoscope of women—a mother, a sister, a homicide detective—we learn the story of Ansel’s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel’s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister’s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the homicide detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake. Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men.

Even blood washes out, or you can fill your mouth with things that hide the taste.

Sophie Mackintosh, excerpt from Cursed Bread

Do you lay bread on your tongue and think of me [...] do you swallow it like a sacrament, do you still get down on your knees?

Sophie Mackintosh, from 'Cursed Bread'

(...) but the skin remembers, the body holds everything inside itself, the bones can stiffen to claws.

Sophie Mackintosh, excerpt from Cursed Bread

Cursed Bread || Sophie Mackintosh ★★★★★ Started: 07.10.2024 Finished: 30.10.2024 One of my favourite reads from last year, Cursed Bread is a short, but stunningly well-written character study of the inhabitants of the small town of Pont-Saint-Esprit, the setting of a 1951 mass poisoning, suspected to be caused by pain maudit (cursed bread). Most notably, the novel follows Elodie, the baker's wife, and her unhealthy infatuation with the ambassador and his mysterious, alluring wife, Violet.