The Carnation Milk Palace

Lushly immersive stories exploring the ties that bind women together

Among these eleven acclaimed stories, readers will witness a young girl’s coming of age in 1960s California on New Year’s Eve; a woman scooping honeybees from her Phoenix pool as she awaits news of her husband, deployed in Iraq; a divorcée and her daughters visiting their grandmother in Hawaii ahead of a deadly tsunami; aging sisters whose secrets are revealed on holiday in Vienna; a delightfully tipsy game of croquet on Mother’s Day; a family trying to hold itself together over Christmas as the war in Vietnam divides the country; and the naïve Mrs. Wisdom, whose first grandchild ushers in a lifting of the veil between Halloween and Thanksgiving.

Leavened by humor and the many forms of love, The Carnation Milk Palace is a moving, evocative tribute to women at all stages of their lives and to the overriding power of forgiveness, selflessness, resilience, and the lasting, fractured sweetness of memory.