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Anna Burns offers a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.
In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes ‘interesting’. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous…
Anna Burns
About the Author
Anna Burns was born in Belfast. She is the author of three novels - No Bones, Little Constructions and Milkman - and of the novella Mostly Hero.Anna Burns on Milkman
‘The narrator of Milkman was the first character to appear. She was strong and clear in her thoughts and I had instant access to them. I didn’t arrive at the decision she was to be the main character. Simply, it became clear to me she was as we were going along. In my first book, initially I thought a character called Vincent was the main guy and I cannot remember now why I thought that. Maybe I was getting a lot about him, from him, or from the other characters. But he got pushed to the side by another character, Amelia, and it was she who turned out to be the main one. I wouldn’t say she took over in the book which is what I thought at the time when she came forward. I think now, this was a case of my being new to writing and to my own process. It took me a while to see what had always been there. I can’t imagine I’d ever worry about who is ‘the one’ to carry a story. I’m not interested in doing so. It sorts itself out. Same with other major and even minor characters. I get a lot of information about nearly everybody, you see, far more than ever goes into the final writing. I take notes on it all but I have to let it be for I couldn’t tell in the early stages who has what standing in the novel. That’s part of the messy bit of writing, also the ‘holding’ bit of my writing. When eventually everything falls into place, whatever isn’t needed falls away also. No need to work out what bits of a character are in and what bits are out. It’s an absolute necessity though, that I carry all the bits.’
Read the full interview here.
Anna Burns, 2019
© David Levenson/Getty ImagesWhat the judges said
‘Anna Burns’s utterly distinctive voice challenges conventional thinking and form in surprising and immersive prose. It is a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humour.’
What the critics said
Mark O’Connell, Slate
‘For all the simplicity of its setup, Milkman is a richly complex portrayal of a besieged community and its traumatized citizens, of lives lived within many concentric circles of oppression […] Among Burns’ singular strengths as a writer is her ability to address the topics of trauma and tyranny with a playfulness that somehow never diminishes the sense of her absolute seriousness.’
Adrian McKinty, The Irish Times
‘Burns’s agenda is not to unpack the dreary tribal squabbles that so characterised Troubles-era Northern Ireland; rather she is working in an altogether more interesting milieu, seeking answers to the big questions about identity, love, enlightenment and the meaning of life for a young woman on the verge of adulthood.’
Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
‘A useful point of comparison, doubling as a compliment and a caveat, is with Samuel Beckett. Next to nothing happens in Milkman, yet Ms. Burns, like the novel’s many gossips, constructs a monument from middle sister’s digressive, repetitive, idle, sardonic, amused and amusing talk. The story doesn’t advance so much as thicken, reaching a critical mass of absurdist misapprehensions. The bright thread of exasperated sarcasm that runs through the narrative compensates for its wheel-spinning. Ms. Burns, while frank about the brutality of the state forces, is refreshingly disrespectful to the insurgents.’
Clair Wills, The New York Review of Books
‘Burns’s genius lies in entirely renouncing the classic truth-discovery plot. Detective work—even at its most Miss Marple, most feminine and unassuming—is completely unavailable to middle sister […] There were times reading Milkman when I thought I would get a cramp from laughing, but it is hard to do justice to the book’s humor in a review because much of it comes from the sheer length of characters’ speeches and of grown-up middle sister’s own free-wheeling, digressive, retrospective narration.’
Cameron Woodhead, The Sydney Morning Herald
‘This brilliant and unsettling novel from Irish author Anna Burns is a shaggy dog story – digressive, full of oddball incident and intellectual whimsy […] Milkman is compelling contemporary Irish fiction, canvassing dark material and difficult themes through a vivid, smart and loquacious narrative voice.’
Anna Burns talks about Milkman, her 2018 Booker Prize winning novel
