Can happiness be found at the bottom of a cereal bowl? A 27-year-old woman working at a cereal bar discovers that sipping her customers’ leftover cereal milk allows her to enter alternate worlds in which she is finally happy in this charmingly offbeat new work of “healing fiction,” a fantastical and heartwarming story about an outsider’s search for connection.

“Weird, wonderful, and important . . . Murashige creates the best and most beautiful kind of strange, the kind that breaks your heart and puts its shards back together like a beautiful kintsugi cereal bowl.” —Samantha Sotto Yambao, national bestselling author of Water Moon

Beverly “Bev” Kitagawa struggles to connect with people. For the last decade, her vow to write a novel about the boy she romantically spurned in college—as an apology to him—has given her purpose. But with little to show for it ten years later, Bev is beginning to feel hopeless. The only constant in her life is her job at Cows, a cereal bar at the local mall.

Then, on a whim, Bev takes a sip of milk from a customer’s bowl and temporarily slips into an alternate timeline of her life. There, she has everything that seems impossible in her actual existence. A romance with a customer she’s crushed on from afar. Close friendships that have eluded her. The writing career she’s always dreamed of.

So she takes another sip. And another.

As she races to finish writing her real-life book, Bev dives deeper into the milkiverse. Is the next sip the key to the success, acceptance, forgiveness and love she’s spent a decade searching for? Hopeful, poignant, and full of small drops of wonder, Milkiverse is a beautifully strange adventure through lives lived and unlived and a deeply empathetic exploration of both the pains and joys of connecting with other people.