Sophie Mackintosh is the author of novels The Water Cure (2018), Blue Ticket (2020), and Cursed Bread (2023). The Water Cure was longlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize. Her fiction, non-fiction and poetry has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Dazed, Guardian, and The Stinging Fly, among others. In 2020 she was picked as "a face set to define the decade ahead" by Vogue UK, alongside writers Jia Tolentino and Oyinkan Braithwaite.
At the Waterstones blog Mackintosh tagged six favorite "books that deal with themes of desire in all its manifold forms," including:
A Sport and a Pastime by James SalterRead about the other entries on the list.
Probably the sexiest book ever written, A Sport and a Pastime looks on the surface like a story of a doomed love affair in sixties France between a rich American and a working-class shop girl. But as they travel the country, and we travel with them, observing the most intimate moments in hotel after hotel, we realise we’re being let in on a stunning narrative trick: a projection of the loneliness and inadequacies of the narrator (an acquaintance of the American) as he imagines a love affair that he’s never truly involved in. It’s a beautifully written account of both the desires and discoveries of the central couple and the secret desires of the narrator himself, watching from a distance.
A Sport and a Pastime is among Alex Christofi's top ten books on postwar France, Chris Killen's top ten novels about lost friendships, Emma Straub's top ten holidays in fiction, Thomas H. Cook's five must reads on the writing life, Adam Ross's favorite books under 200 pages, Lorin Stein's six Paris Review book picks, and Jeff Gordinier's list of five books that will make you question the wisdom of ever falling in love.
--Marshal Zeringue
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