Anna Burns
Books by Anna Burns
Milkman
by Anna Burns
Winner of the 2018 Booker Prize, Milkman is a disquieting tale of sexual harassment set in Belfast during The Troubles—or at least, that's what the reader must surmise. As with many aspects of this unusual novel, its setting is never made explicit. The narrator is a young, bookish woman feeling her way through life in a society soaked in fear and paranoia; when she finds herself the focus of unwanted advances from a shadowy dissident figure known only as 'the milkman,' local gossips go into overdrive. Must she accept her new, unasked-for status as a paramilitary hanger-on?
Milkman also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2019, and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in the same year.
Interviews where books by Anna Burns were recommended
The Best Ergodic Fiction, recommended by Arianna Reiche
The best fiction doesn’t have to be straightforward, and some novels contain clever devices to make the reader complicit in the story itself. Arianna Reiche, lecturer in metafiction at City, University of London, recommends five gamified novels that subvert our ideas of how fiction works.
The Best Fiction of 2018, recommended by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Looking for the best novels of the year? Kwame Anthony Appiah, professor of philosophy at New York University and chair of the 2018 Man Booker Prize for fiction, gives an in-depth breakdown of the six books that made this year’s shortlist, and reflects on why the novel as a form is stronger than ever.
