It had been my fault too, it seemed, this affair with the milkman. I knew his age, not because he got shot and it was given by the media, but because there had been talk before this, for months before the shooting, by these people of the rumour, that forty-one and eighteen was disgusting, that twenty-three years’ difference was disgusting, that he was married and not to be fooled by me for there were plenty of quiet, unnoticeable people who took a bit of watching. Others did care though, and some were those who, in the parlance, ‘knew me to see but not to speak to’ and I was being talked about because there was a rumour started by them, or more likely by first brother-in-law, that I had been having an affair with this milkman and that I was eighteen and he was forty-one. He had been shot by one of the state hit squads and I did not care about the shooting of this man.

The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.

The novel begins by immediately telling us what it is about: The escape that reading provides is important enough to her that she often reads while she walks. She likes to read classic eighteenth or nineteenth-century novels, partly because she enjoys them but also to avoid engaging with the dicey local politics whose consequences can be (and often are) deadly. The first-person narrator is an eighteen-year-old girl. The two sides of the political conflict are referred to as “renouncers of the state” and “defenders of the state.” England is “the country over the water,” and Ireland “the country over the border.” Since the characters are unnamed, the narrator / central character is referred to as “middle sister” by her sisters, “maybe girlfriend” by her unofficial boyfriend and “daughter” by her mother. The story takes place in an unnamed city but enough markers are given that a reader can place it as Belfast in the 1970s, during the Troubles.

Some readers have struggled with this and reviews are polarized however, I thought it was not only readable but entertaining. Milkman has been called “experimental fiction” because it’s written in stream-of-consciousness narration conveyed through long sentences and paragraphs, because the narrative goes on long tangents, and because the characters and places go unnamed. That and a rave review from Sunita convinced me to read it. Your novel, Milkman, recently won the Man Booker Prize.

Anna burns books