DESCRIPTION
So many women down the ages have lain awake in the earth’s great shadow, insomniac over their progeny, their sons and daughters intent on escaping their mothers’ intractable worry.
Don’t come, Kate is told by her only child. Jess is keeping her mother at a distance on the day that her own children, conjoined twins, are to be separated during high-risk surgery in London.
Kate wakes on her farm in the Eastern Cape, torn between respecting Jess’s wishes and a longing to rush to her estranged daughter’s side.
A former geneticist disillusioned by the pressing ethical questions posed by her job, Kate is now an award-winning maker of organic cheese. She relies on the farm’s routine and the people and animals in her life to hold steady as her day teeters on a knife’s edge.
Meanwhile, her employee Nosisi’s son is undergoing initiation. Forbidden to have contact with him during this traditional passage into the world of manhood, his mother anxiously awaits his return.
Breaking Milk, Dawn Garisch’s seventh novel, is an evocative exploration of the divisions and connections between humans, animals and the environment.
ISBN: 978-0-6399942-2-2
Publication date: 1 September 2019
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DAWN GARISCH is the highly acclaimed author of a non-fiction work, a memoir and six novels, three of which were published in the UK. She has written for television and has had five of her plays and a short film produced.
Her poem Blood Delta won the DALRO Prize in 2007 for best poem, and Miracle won the EU Sol Plaatje Poetry Award in 2011. Difficult Gifts, her debut poetry collection, was published the same year. She also writes short stories and her What To Do About Ricky won the Short.Sharp.Story competition in 2013.
Dawn’s novel Trespass was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in Africa in 2010, and Accident was longlisted for the Barry Ronge Sunday Times Fiction Prize in 2018.
She is part of the medical humanities movement and a founding member of the Life Righting Collective where she runs courses in memoir writing. Dawn is also a practising medical doctor and lives in Cape Town.
Breaking Milk, published by Karavan Press, is her seventh novel.
Author photograph by AJ Wattamaniuk.
It was quite a while ago that Melissa A. Volker and I sat at Jonkerhuis, discussing over cake and coffee a version of the manuscript that would eventually become her novel 
‘I’m usually not a romance reader, but I gobbled these up. These are eco-romances. But they are also thrillers. They are eco-romance thrillers,’ said Jacqui, coining a wonderful term that describes Melissa’s work. 
Cape Times, 12 July 2019
It is always a magical moment: holding your first book copies in your hands. They never feel entirely real, but the joy that is bubbling inside you is overwhelming so, always. Yesterday, that moment was particularly exuberant because Melissa and I were experiencing it together: she as author, I as publisher. Karavan Press’s first ever titles: 
After the initial trouble with the binding of the first printrun, the second turned out to be perfect and so worth waiting for. The delay was daunting and frustrating, but both Melissa and I knew that what we had imagined for these novels had to become reality in order for us to be able to share them with our readers with all the exhilaration these special books deserve. And now, they are here. And they are everything we have wanted them to be.
We hope to see the first copies in bookshops countrywide sometime next week, and we hope to see many enthusiastic readers at 
LESTER WALBRUGH is from Grabouw in the Western Cape. His acclaimed short stories have been published in, among others, the anthologies of Short.Sharp.Stories and Short Story Day Africa, New Contrast and, most recently, Hair: Weaving & Unpicking Stories of Identity. He has lived in the UK and Japan and is currently back in his hometown. 
It is our great pleasure to announce that our author, Melissa A. Volker, will be participating in this year’s 
karavanpress.com 