Deep in the French countryside, a farm is blind with secrets, and an exhausted family struggles to survive. The father can’t pay the bills, the brothers compete with one other, and the mother tries desperately to suppress the weight of the past. Enveloped in visceral silence, the farm animals witness a family tragedy unfolding before their eyes. And since the humans remain silent, it is the animals who must tell their story. 

Milk and Blood is a choral novel like no other, narrated by farm animals as they observe the humans who exploit, kill, and love them. Death and life contract like a shimmering muscle, and quiet devastation lies beneath the surface. Yet amidst this bleak brutality, it is Clairville’s tenderness that is most affecting, as she draws poetry from mud and compassion from violence, in what is ultimately a declaration of love to those who feed us.

“Milk and Blood is a striking novel, totally original and gripping. Agnès de Clairville avoids any anthropomorphising and touches on a huge variety of topics. She knows the rural world inside out and questions our relationship to other living creatures as well as our very humanity.”Geraldine D’Amico, publisher

“I am thrilled to be working on Agnès de Clairville’s Milk and Blood — a lucid, angry novel about the rigours of farming life. Daringly, the multiple voices that narrate her second novel are those of the animals. But this is no Orwellian satire, nor is it a mawkish piece of anthropomorphism. It is a spare, meticulously detailed bucolic tragedy that pulses with passion and with anger.” Frank Wynne, translator

“Milk and Blood tells us with a rare force about birth, filiation and inheritance, denial and things left unsaid, a drama enacted in the wings, “behind closed doors but in the open”, where life and death meet again and again until they become one.“ Figaro Madame

“This pastoral tragedy, cleverly built around two parts which echo each other along the cycles of life and death, is a subtle anthem to those who feed us.” Le Monde

 “Agnès de Clairville has not chosen to elevate animals towards civilisation but rather to bring the humans down to the mud in the stables.” Elle