"A novel that stays with you like a family memory. A voice that envelops and moves, that tells of a tender, lost, sometimes cruel motherhood, and the pride of belonging to a land, Ciociaria, and its wisdom."
—Roberta Recchia

★Arabic, German and French translation rights under discussion.
★A powerful and deeply contemporary novel, "Milk" uses the social phenomenon of "wet nurses" in 1950s Italy to explore motherhood, sisterhood and the complex roles of women in society and family.
★With concise yet profound strokes, brimming with echoes of the distant past, "Milk" is a powerful and delicate debut that tells of the forms of motherhood that remain relevant today and asks: What does "family" really mean?

Two mothers, one by blood and one a wet nurse.

Two sincere and unsettling voices that come from far away to tell us about the absolute and fierce experience of family, in its most diverse forms.

An intense and moving debut novel that addresses the topic of "mercenary” wet nursing, a phenomenon that lasted until the sixties of the twentieth century, when formula milk went into trade.

Bologna, late Fifties. Two women live in the same house, and are mothers, in different ways, to the same child. Olimpia is a young, modern, and educated woman, docile to the rules of what her family has always called "civilization," a lazy and conservative bourgeoisie that raised her to become a wife and mother. Ada, on the other hand, is from Ciociaria, a working-class girl who left her village, her beloved husband and children to be a wet nurse for Olimpia's baby, abandoning a daily life of hardship but also of small domestic happiness to tiptoe into a new house, where she will learn to be an invisible presence to nourish the other's newborn. Olimpia and Ada have distant voices and manners, almost at odds, yet a sisterhood of spirit and body is recognizable in them. Because their relationship passes especially through the body: Ada's vital and exposed body and Olimpia's delicate one, which she no longer recognizes since she gave birth. The mystery of Pietro, a child abandoned at the foundling wheel of the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome during the fascist era, acts as a counterpoint to their lives. With an essential and profound writing style, full of the echoes of a distant past, Latte is a powerful and delicate debut at the same time, which gives us back the now forgotten history of wet nurses in the twentieth century. A novel that tells us about very current forms of motherhood and questions us about what it means to be a family.

MARINA ZUCCHELLI (1985) lives in Rome and is a television author. She works as a freelancer, and for the production company Stand By Me, she mainly deals with documentaries for Rai3.