Milk Teeth

Having only ever known life with her mother, Skalde is confined to the boundaries of their plot of land — they have never seen blue in the sky and their region has been plagued by fog for as long as they can remember. Resigned to their fate, Skalde fills her days reading, writing and trying to live under her reclusive mother Edith’s rules, until one day, from seemingly nowhere, a girl named Meisis arrives and Skalde decides to go against Edith’s wishes by letting her into their home. For the surrounding community, Meisis’s arrival can only mean the worst and her presence proves to be too much for them, a group that has decided to separate itself from the rest of the world and to do whatever it takes to survive, to handle.

Beautifully written in immersive, spare prose, Helene Bukowski’s debut novel is about what it means to be a mother at the end of the world, about living with the impacts of climate change and the way we view and treat ‘outsiders’. Jen Calleja’s remarkable translation is a moving rendition of this modern fairy-tale, where each moment witnessed, and every word uttered, is weighted with importance in the quiet, dying world of these characters living on the brink.