Bread and Salt

Family, friends, and strangers reveal their shared vulnerabilities when connecting and parting in this short story collection from an award-winning author.

Lambda Literary Award finalist Valerie Miner's Bread and Salt features sixteen stories that explore people's relationships, those that are nurtured to last, others that are lost to time, and spontaneous meetings that change one's perspective in unexpected, enlightening ways. These stories take readers across the United States and to Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Europe.

A cancer survivor finds a home—and a family—in a Mediterranean villa whose occupants share their appreciation for delicious cuisine, multicultural artistry, and the mystery of love in "Il Piccolo Tesoro."

Someone's watching over the welfare of a widowed postal worker, restoring her faith in life after tragedy in "Quiet as the Moon."

Commuters become a community when an "Incident on the Tracks" gives a trio of travelers an opportunity to open up about their lives.

"The Women at Coral Villas" strike up a friendship while vacationing in Indonesia despite differences in age, culture, and experience as they struggle to communicate with and understand one another.

A visit to Tunisia brings back decades-old memories of a woman's lost love. But her desire to find him is complicated when she finds herself questioning his involvement in a bombing in "Bread and Salt."

Whether traveling internationally or staying close to home, remembering the past or considering the future, reconciling with family or meeting someone new, the characters in Valerie Miner's stories come into each other's orbit under circumstances both wondrous and tragic, and their reactions are exceptionally human.

"Miner deftly transports her characters—and the reader—across myriad emotional, political, and geographical terrains, leaving us breathless. A marvel of a collection." —Patricia Powell, author of The Pagoda