Breaking Milk, Dawn Garisch
“One of the most original novels I’ve read in a long time…”
An evocative and explorative novel, Breaking Milk is one of those rare novels that perfectly brings together the specificities of a particular time and place with a sense of universal resonance. In one of the most original novels I’ve read in a long time, Garisch beautifully weaves ideas of human connection, separation, and the destruction of both personal relationships and our relationship with the earth we all inhabit.
Set in the Eastern Cape of South Africa and unfolding over a single day, we follow Kate, a former geneticist turned cheese-maker, as she methodically carries out the intricate and all-encompassing process of creating organic cheese. This routine – the necessary mundanities that build a life – acts as an anchor throughout the novel, as Kate contemplates her past and future while awaiting life-altering news from her estranged daughter.
Replete with meditations on motherhood, the disconnections, attachments and fragility of relationships between humans, our minds, the land, and animals, Breaking Milk is a tender yet forceful novel that asks complex questions about the human condition and how we choose to move through an uncertain world.
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