On Sale Jan 26, 2027
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Lushly immersive stories exploring the ties that bind women together
“A stunning collection from one of our country’s most gifted short story writers. Written with emotional acuity, these stories are filled with tremendous compassion, psychological complexity, and spiritual grace. We see characters in the midst of journeys both literal and figurative, confronting the pasts that haunt them, the secrets buried in their family histories, all while navigating the challenging terrain of their current lives. There are few writers today who write with as much technical mastery and elegance or who understand the human condition as deeply as Melissa Pritchard.”—Andrew Porter, author of The Disappeared and The Imagined Life
Reviews for The Carnation Milk Palace
“Wonderful. . . . Pritchard writes with emotional resonance and insight about women’s vulnerabilities and resilience in life and love. . . . The effect is effortlessly poetic.”
—Booklist (★ Starred review)
“The women in these 11 exquisite stories face crucial experiences in their lives, including coming of age, experiencing grief, dealing with loss, and growing older. Pritchard (Flight of the Wild Swan) has an ear for dialog, an eye for detail, and a talent for creating engaging characters that are finely drawn, multidimensional, and far from stereotypical. Their stories are set in different times and places, from Venice in 1703 to Menlo Park, CA, in 1966 to southeast Georgia in 1932, but each one centers a woman who is coming into her own. Pritchard endows her characters with humor and grace, whether it’s a 14-year-old drinking her first glass of champagne and seeing her parents in an unflattering new light, a naive grandmother who realizes something awful about her late husband, or a pair of sisters of a certain age who reconnect and share secrets on a Viennese holiday. Themes of motherhood, friendship, marriage, memory, and forgiveness run through these stories like colorful threads in an intricate tapestry.
–Library Journal (★ Starred review)
“The female protagonists of these exquisite stories from Pritchard (Flight of the Wild Swan) struggle to extract meaning from their maddening lives. In the opener, set in 1963, 14-year-old Charlotte attends a debaucherous New Year’s Eve party hosted by friends of her parents, where she narrowly avoids being raped by a young man who acts as if she gave him the idea. Later in the evening, she witnesses her mother seduce a younger man. “Flat Shoals,” a ghost story about the legacy of slavery, offers a glimpse of two aging spinsters in 1930s Georgia, still living in a crumbling antebellum mansion with their father, a Civil War veteran who fought for the Confederacy, and a woman who was formerly enslaved by the family and continues to care for them. “Rose Ivoire” centers on a doctor attending the wedding of her daughter, where she cannot reconcile the bride’s vacuousness with her own work treating malaria and AIDS patients in Southeast Asia, where she has fallen in love with a doctor who’s dying of AIDS. Each of Pritchard’s stories are humane and stirring in their accounts of abuse, isolation, and longing. As one woman character concludes, “The point is, it’s all around us. The chance to love while there’s time. To be loved while we’re still here.” Every page contains the pleasure of a clarifying truth.”