Bread and Milk

From one of Sweden's most loved authors, an essayistic memoir about women and food, translated by Saskia Vogel.

Bread and Milk traces a life through food, from a bag of tangerines devoured in one sitting to the luxury of a grandmother’s rice pudding, from pancakes meant to make up for a mother’s absence to perfectly sliced tomatoes winning, at last, a distant father’s approval; it explores how food can fill an emptiness but also consume you. After all, what we eat is inexorably intertwined with how we love.

In this radiant memoir, one of Sweden’s most acclaimed writers considers the complex relationships between the women in her family as they struggle with financial and emotional vulnerability, and how those relationships replicate themselves in fraught and obsessive relationships with food. 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.

‘Karolina Ramqvist’s writing is straight-talking scripture, a spiritual text in memoir form. Food isn’t just love or its opposite; food marks time for the mortal body. Food is how people remember the people who no longer exist to make and eat food. Ramqvist’s mind is transgressively pragmatic, and a constant source of enlightenment. Instead of saying, “Look at what you didn’t know,” her book says, “Look at what you thought you didn’t know, but always did.”’ – Heidi Julavits, author of Directions to Myself

‘Swedish novelist Ramqvist’s highly relatable memoir details the problems that can arise when a child associates food with love … The term “food memoir” doesn’t quite encompass her profound autobiographical journey … her story, with its lush and evocative prose, will speak to many readers.’ – Booklist