She has published two previous novels and a novella her first novel, “No Bones,” which also takes place in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, was shortlisted for the 2002 Orange Prize for Fiction. Burns, 56, who was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and now lives south of London, is the first Northern Irish writer to win the Booker in the prize’s history. In a review for The Guardian, the novelist Claire Kilroy called the novel’s narrator, and the book itself, “original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique.” “Milkman” was published in Britain in May by Faber & Faber, and the independent publisher Graywolf Press will release the novel in the United States in December.
The narrative would become heavy and lifeless and refuse to move on until I took them out again.” “In the early days I tried out names a few times, but the book wouldn’t stand for it. Burns said in an interview for the Man Booker Prize website. None of the characters have names - they are labeled instead, as longest friend, maybe-boyfriend, wee sisters, Somebody McSomebody.
Against the background of this turbulent epoch, with the constant threat of car bombs and riots, the narrator deals with a menacing stalker, who is known only as Milkman, though he doesn’t deliver milk. The novel unfolds in an unnamed city during “the Troubles,” a prolonged civil conflict in Northern Ireland that gave rise to sectarian violence and guerrilla warfare. “It is a story of brutality, sexual encroachment and resistance threaded with mordant humor.” “None of us had ever read anything like this before,” the writer and philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, chair of this year’s judges, said in a statement. Burns’s use of dark humor to explore weighty themes like the perils of tribalism, state-sponsored terrorism, social division and the ways that sexual and political oppression often overlap. Anna Burns won the Man Booker Prize on Tuesday for her novel “Milkman,” which is narrated by an unnamed 18-year-old girl living in 1970s Northern Ireland who is coerced into a relationship with a mysterious older married man with ties to a paramilitary group.
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