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
Shortlisted for the 2025 John Calder Translation Prize
"Brilliantly written, Ramqvist's portrayal of food in her life, of bread and milk, opens the door to the reader to examine her own deepest feelings about what food truly means." – Judy Corser, Culinary Historians of Canada
"Like all good books about food, Bread and Milk is sensuous and evocative. Saskia Vogel, one of the foremost translators of contemporary Swedish literature, carefully renders both the breadth and the specificity of the book's culinary language, to cornucopian effect." – Nina Renata Aron, Words Without Borders
"Ramqvist reflects on love and family as she pulls forth memories of her girlhood and her mother and grandmother and their - sometimes fraught - relationships to food. There is physical hunger and then there is the hunger for something more; Ramqvist writes viscerally and vulnerably about her own disordered eating amidst loss and wanting. Her story is one that will never leave me." – Pierce Alquist, Book Riot
"This made me hungry. Reading about the author's life and her relationship with food, the comfort of meals with her grandparents, the challenge of feeding oneself, the hunger for her mother's attention--I was compelled and couldn't put it down." – Jessica J., Tempe Public Library
"Bread and Milk is delight-filled memoir–a multicourse helping of food-based memories seasoned to perfection with keen introspection." – Michelle Anne Schingler, Foreward Reviews
"If Annie Ernaux and Marcel Proust had a love child it would be Bread and Milk by Karolina Ramqvist. A visceral and poignant exploration of the author's memories of her mother and grandmother through the lens of food and eating, Bread and Milk tells a story that many of us share." – Laurel Kane, White Whale Bookstore
"The strange thing is that, parallel to Ramqvist's remembering, my own memories of food and people are activated, and suddenly there are tastes, smells and voices that I thought I had long forgotten." – Svenska Dagbladet
"In such an associative and winding story a
