The once illustrious, once wealthy Melroses are in peril. Caught up in the wreckage of broken promises, child-rearing, adultery and assisted suicide, Patrick finds his wife consumed by motherhood, his mother consumed by a New Age foundation, and his five-year-old son Robert understanding far more than he ought.

Mother's Milk is a dazzling exploration of the troubled allegiances between parents and children, husbands and wives: acerbically witty, disarmingly tender, it goes to the core of a family trapped in the remains of its ever-present past.