The narrator's walks catch the attention of Milkman, a so-called paramilitary “renouncer” (akin to the Irish Republican Army that opposed British rule), who has an unsettling depth of knowledge about this young woman. The atmosphere turns every abnormality, however slight, into a target for surveillance and scrutiny. These were knife-edge times, primal times, with everybody suspicious of everybody,” the narrator explains. That conflict – over Northern Ireland's relationship with the United Kingdom, and stoked by religious divisions – goes unnamed, as does the narrator. That makes the book less historical fiction than an allegorical tale on how life in a war zone short-circuits our capacity to speak and think clearly. It's set in the 1970s and inspired by the Troubles, which for decades consumed Burns' native Northern Ireland with sectarian violence. But she’s in a time and place where minding one’s own business is all but impossible.īurns’ novel, winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize in Britain, is now being published in the U.S. Read a book while walking home, or catch a sunset with the guy she’s kinda-sorta seeing. The 18-year-old woman who narrates Anna Burns’ dark, piercing novel “Milkman” (Graywolf Press, 360 pp., ★★★½ out of four) just wants to mind her own business.
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