“Priests and guns”: a review of Malediction by Sally Spedding

With its one-word title and extremely striking cover, Sally Spedding’s novel Malediction promises a lot, and delivers. The sense of time and place, France 1997, is evoked seemingly effortlessly in this story of racial hatred, Neo-Nazis, “so-called men of god” and a mother seeking her lost son. As well as a page-turner, the novel works as a terrifying parable of how faith can tip over into intolerance and, at its most extreme, acts of cruelty and violence.