Milkman
#1 IRISH TIMES BEST IRISH BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY
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- 11,99 €
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
WINNER OF THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD
'Utterly compelling' Irish Times
'Original, funny, disarmingly oblique' CLAIRE KILROY
'A triumph.' Guardian
In an unnamed city, where to be interesting is dangerous, an eighteen-year-old woman has attracted the unwanted and unavoidable attention of a powerful and frightening older man, 'Milkman'. In this community, where suggestions quickly become fact, where gossip and hearsay can lead to terrible consequences, what can she do to stop a rumour once it has started? Milkman is persistent, the word is spreading, and she is no longer in control . . .
SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Set in 1970s Northern Ireland, this captivating novel explores timely themes of psychological abuse and surveillance states. The moment Anna Burns’ unnamed narrator declares her obsession with reading classics because she “did not like the twentieth century”, we were hooked. As the 18-year-old becomes the victim of neighbourhood gossip, Milkman’s stream-of-consciousness prose invites us to view the world through her mistrusting eyes. Burns uses few proper names or places. Instead, characters are named “maybe-boyfriend”, “Somebody McSomebody” and, most importantly, “milkman”—bundling us up in the oppressive, small-minded atmosphere of the book’s anonymous city.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her Booker-winning novel, Burns (No Bones) gives an acute, chilling, and often wry portrait of a young woman and a district under siege. The narrator she and most of the characters are unnamed ("maybe-boyfriend," "third brother-in-law," "Somebody McSomebody") lives in an unspecified town in Northern Ireland during the Troubles of the 1970s. Her town is effectively governed by paramilitary renouncers of the state "over the water," as they call it. The community is wedged between the renouncers, meting out rough justice for any suspected disloyalty, and the state's security forces. One day, "milkman," a "highranking, prestigious dissident" who has nothing to do with the milk trade, offers the narrator a ride. From this initial approach, casual but menacing, the community, already suspicious of her for her "beyond-the-pale" habit of walking and reading 19th-century literature, assumes that she is involved with the rebel. Milkman, however, is in essence stalking her, and over the course of several months she strives, under increasing pressure, to evade his surveilling gaze and sustained "unstoppable predations." There is a touch of James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus in the narrator's cerebral reticence, employing as she does silence, exile, and cunning in her attempt to fly the nets of her "intricately coiled, overly secretive, hyper-gossippy, puritanical yet indecent, totalitarian district." Enduring the exhausting "minutiae of invasion" to which she is subjected by milkman, and the incursion of the Troubles on every aspect of life, the narrator of this claustrophobic yet strangely buoyant tale undergoes an unsentimental education in sexual politics. This is an unforgettable novel.
