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Maybe you can go home again? The Milking is a sensual, playful story about reconciling your past. And cows.
Reeling from a breakup with her girlfriend, Ellen finds herself driving to the small farm where she grew up, a place she’s done everything she can to leave behind.
The new owners are on vacation, but the hidden key is in the same spot. She enters the house, just to look around. She’s so tired: she’ll stay one night. But then she just can’t leave. Everything and nothing is familiar, including the neighbour Max, her childhood friend. The cows are gone, and the barn closed down, yet the taste of fresh milk lingers on her tongue like when she was a child, and the smell of manure is still in her nose.
Who can really say that the place isn’t hers? It’s so much a part of her. The country, with its smells and sounds, its hardships and shame, has drawn her back. Maybe as the small family farm and its way of life recede further into the distance, Ellen can find some solace in her past – hopefully before the new owners return…
Winner of the Borås Tidning Award for Best Literary Debut (Borås Tidnings debutantpris)
Winner of the Prisma Literary Award, Novel of the Year (Årets roman)
Nominated for the Katapult Prize for Debut Fiction (Katapultpriset)
Sanna Samuelsson was also awarded the Swedish Radio Short Story Prize
‘An extraordinarily multi-layered and exquisite novel… She deftly intermingles social realism with the narrator's personal story.’ – Aftonbladet
‘The simultaneously reassuring and mortifying smell of manure is a constant throughout Sanna Samuelsson’s strong debut novel. It’s a nuanced and tender story about belonging, both to a class and a place, written intimately close to animals and nature.’ – Svenska Dagbladet
‘A sensual story of homecomings and a striking depiction of rural change… An impressive debut.’ – Barometern
‘Non-romanticizing and sensual depiction of rural life.’ – Sveriges Radio
‘Sanna Samuelsson's novel is extraordinarily multi-layered and beautiful.’ – Amelie Bjorck, Aftonbladet
‘Sanna Samuelsson's debut novel is like no other.’ – Dagens Nyheter
Sanna Samuelsson, born in 1987, grew up outside Linköping and lives in Stockholm. She has a master's degree in literary design from HDK-Valand, has previously been an ideas and criticism editor at GP and is active as a cultural writer. Mjölkat is her debut novel, for which she was nominated for the Katapult Prize and awarded the Prisma Prize in 2023 and the Borås Newspaper Debutant Prize in 2024. In 2025 she won the Swedish Radio Novel Prize.
Saskia Vogel grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives in Berlin, where she works as a writer and Swedish-to-English literary translator. With Coach House Books, she is the translator of Karolina Ramqvist’s The Bear Woman (2022) and Bread and Milk (2025), which was shortlisted for the John Calder Translation Prize. She has written on the themes of gender, power, and sexuality for publications such as The White Review, The Offing, and The Quietus. Previously, she worked as Granta magazine's global publicist and as an editor at the AVN Media Network, where she reported on pornography and adult pleasure products. She is the author of the novel Permission (Coach House Books, 2019).