Milk Fed

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What to expect

A scathingly funny, wildly erotic and fiercely imaginative story about food, sex and god from the Women's Prize longlisted author of The Pisces

A STYLIST, INDEPENDENT, THE WEEK AND RED HIGHLIGHT FOR 2021

'Sexy and fun and a little weird ... This riot of carnal pleasure will make you laugh as well as gasp' The Times

'A revelation ... Melissa Broder has produced one of the strangest and sexiest novels of the new year ... Exhilarating' Entertainment Weekly

'A luscious, heartbreaking story of self-discovery through the relentless pursuit of desire. I couldn’t get enough of this devastating and extremely sexy book' Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of control by way of obsessive food rituals. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine.

Then Rachel meets Miriam, a young Orthodox Jewish woman intent upon feeding her. Rachel is suddenly and powerfully entranced by Miriam – by her sundaes and her body, her faith and her family – and as the two grow closer, Rachel embarks on a journey marked by mirrors, mysticism, mothers, milk, and honey.

Pairing superlative emotional insight with unabashed vivid fantasy, Melissa Broder tells a tale of appetites: of physical hunger, of sexual desire, of spiritual longing. Milk Fed is a tender and riotously funny meditation on love, certitude, and the question of what we are all being fed, from one of our major writers on the psyche – both sacred and profane.

Critics Review

  • Every encounter is written with sumptuous detail, from glutting on nachos to intimate sex scenes (real and imagined), making for a simultaneously uncomfortable and revelatory read

    Evening Standard
  • Melissa Broder’s exhilarating, bleakly funny Milk Fed is another study of female appetite … The most eroticised, tender and romanticised writing in this singular novel is of food’

    Sunday Times
  • Milk Fed is a rich, sensual comedy about the joys rather than the privations of the flesh, and with a large number of extremely filthy sex scenes… A funny, sexy, romance about transgressive desire and whipped cream

    Daily Mail
  • Melissa Border’s imagination, which gave us the story of a woman falling in love with a merman in The Pisces, returns with another wonderfully strange story

    Esquire
  • [An] imaginative story about food, sex and God (yes, all three of those)

    Red
  • Weird, funny and filthy … Milk, motherhood, food, faith, sex and desire are all tangled in a mess of archetypes, delivered with a sarky millennial spin. Milk Fed will be too much for some – too list-y, too vulgar, too solipsistic – but others will delight in its excesses

    Sunday Telegraph

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