Meanwhile, her “maybe-boyfriend” is in a different sort of trouble. Known by her small community as “the milkman”, the man stalks the narrator into a nightmare of gossip and lies, undeterred by her political apathy and romantic disinterest. He seems to be following her and watching her, and while this sort of surveillance wasn’t unheard of by local military figures at the time, she was nobody worth surveilling. Burns’ narrator is a thoughtful eighteen-year-old woman with a racing mind and a penchant for keeping to herself, but to some comes across as a “pale, adamantine, unyielding girl who walks around with the entrenched, boxed-in thinking.” She’d be happy keeping her head down, but is unnerved by the sudden presence of a strange man lurking in her life. Compellingly anxious and paranoid, Anna Burns’ Milkman (winner of the 2018 Booker Prize) is a timely, rambling novel set in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.
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