Anna Burns takes home the Man Booker Prize for her fourth novel Milkman
by Northern Life
Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.
Anna Burns has become the first Northern Irish author to win the Man Booker prize, taking the £50,000 award for Milkman, her timely, Troubles-set novel about a young woman being sexually harassed by a powerful man.
‘The narrator of Milkman disrupts the status quo not through being political, heroic or violently opposed, but because she is original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique: different.’ – The Guardian
Anna Burns’ utterly distinctive voice challenges conventional thinking and form in surprising and immersive prose. Set in a thinly-disguised Troubles-era Belfast, Anna Burns’ novel focuses on its nameless, 18-year-old narrator and her affair with the sinister ‘Milkman’, a much older married man allied with the paramilitaries. ‘While Milkman is a work of timely universality, it is also a distinctly Irish novel,’ observes the New Statesman, ‘a darkly mirthful satire with a twist of Beckettian melancholy and an anarchic touch of Swift.’
Anna Burns’ novel Milkman is available for £6.99 from Waterstones.
