I first read Milkman on its publication in 2018, 20 years on from the historic deal which signalled the end of the Northern Irish conflict. This month sees the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. I read it and immediately recognised home. As her life is monitored, observed and encroached upon, she tries to make sense of a society that has fallen to groupthink. The 18-year-old protagonist, only ever referred to as ‘middle sister’, finds herself accused of an affair with a paramilitary, 23 years her senior. ‘The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me,’ the Belfast teenager begins her story, ‘was the same day the milkman died.’įrom this deliberately sketchy, violent and mordantly funny start, Burns’ tale takes the reader down the rabbit-hole of late 1970s Northern Ireland during its 30-year conflict: the Troubles. The voice of ‘middle sister’, the narrator of Anna Burns’ 2018 Booker Prize-winning novel, Milkman, is so urgent and peculiar - and so specifically Northern Irish - that it felt recognisable to me from its first words.
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