Brutally Intelligent 'Milkman' Depicts Lives Cramped By Fear
Anna Burns' new novel — which won the Man Booker prize — follows a never-named young woman who's being harassed by a powerful paramilitary figure during Ireland's Troubles.
"These were knife-edge times, primal times, with everybody suspicious of everybody," says middle sister, the narrator of Anna Burns's brutally intelligent novel Milkman, set amid the Troubles in 1970's Northern Ireland.
There were the general Troubles, of course, but middle sister's specific troubles begin when a powerful paramilitary figure called the milkman (he's not a milkman) starts offering her rides home. She says no, but he begins trailing her, insinuating himself, making oblique threats.
