2025 Festival: October 20–26
Books & Ideas runs until June!

Bread and Milk

Karolina Ramqvist

Bread and Milk book cover image

February 11, 2025

Coach House Books

  • Nonfiction

Bread and Milk

Karolina Ramqvist

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.