Booker prize-nominee Mackintosh offers, with her third novel, a mesmerising fable set in the prelude to a real-life chilling historical moment. In the summer of 1951 the inhabitants of a small town in the south of France, Pont-Saint-Esprit, succumbed to what appeared to be a mass poisoning.

Myriad theories have been offered as to the cause of the outbreak, but nothing has ever been proven. In Mackintosh’s consuming tale, Elodie is the baker’s wife — a woman who becomes intoxicated by a pair of glamourous strangers in town who ignite her desire for the extraordinary. The incredible stylistic prose of The Water Cure — the debut that catapulted Mackintosh to success — is powerfully at play here once again. There is much to admire on a sentence level and in the author’s ability to immerse the reader in atmospheric other-worldliness. For some, surrendering to the feverish confessional of Elodie will be luxurious. Others may find it suffocating as the narrative thread becomes harder to follow.

There is a conflict in this novel between the realism of the historical event that inspired it and the surrealism of the imaginative tale that it has been fused with. The pre-existing mystery of what happened to the town is such a powerful source of intrigue already that focusing on it through the disorientating lens of Elodie’s fantastical viewpoint feels like a missed opportunity. No doubt Mackintosh intended for this controlled glimpse to offer a specific reading experience that amplified the strangeness of the source material into even more spectacular musings. As it stands, however, the reality and the speculative make for at times uncomfortable bedfellows where the rules of engagement are not always clear.

A completely fictional framework where Mackintosh could indulge in the shimmering excavations she excels at — female desire, unfulfilled passion vs monotony, the extraordinariness of the ordinary — may have allowed her to take greater control of the narrative and avoid the clumsy confusion that at times creeps in. Nonetheless, this short novel has an embarrassment of riches in terms of style, decadence and graceful flair. One to be read for its literary credentials more so than its storytelling, this novel still has charm enough to be compelling.