Bread and Milk

A gorgeous essayistic memoir about how what we eat is inexorably intertwined with how we love

Bread and Milk traces a life through food from carefully restricted low-fat margarine to a bag of tangerines devoured in one setting to the luxury of a grandmother's rice pudding. In this radiant memoir from one of Northern Europe's most notable literary stylists, we follow several generations of women and their daughters as they struggle with financial and emotional vulnerability, independence, and motherhood. When Karolina finds herself a single mother to a young daughter of her own, food becomes the way for her to show her love, but also to instill a fraught and complicated inheritance.

The result is a lush, meditative memoir about the connections we make between food and love: how a mother's emotional absence is filled by the food she painstakingly provides, how a missing father's approval is granted for tomatoes sliced just right. Bread and Milk is at once wholly original and a natural extension of the brazenly intelligent and personal writing that has come to define Karolina Ramqvist's authorship.