MILKMAN is the best Irish book of the 21st century
A jury of sixty experts consisting of authors, critics, academics, festival curators, booksellers and journalists selected the best Irish novels and short story collections of the last twenty years.
We are very happy to find MILKMAN by Anna Burns (2018, Faber & Faber) at the top of the ranking just published in the Irish Times!
The Booker Prize – winning novel is set in an unnamed city that is recognisably the author’s native Belfast. The 18-year-old protagonist, “middle sister”, lives in an enclave under the coercive control of a militant faction opposed to the repressive, discriminatory state, its groupthink-prone inhabitants doubly besieged and surveilled. The eponymous Milkman, a much older, predatory paramilitary, stalks her. She takes refuge in 19th-century literature, reading as she walks to navigate this hostile environment whose inhabitants are trapped by history, poverty and paranoia. Burns’s feisty, feminist narrative is circuitous rather than linear, its repetitiveness reflecting her characters’ entrapment, but it is surprisingly, surpassingly funny, with sly, sometimes absurdist humour.
You can find a nice review from The Guardian here and the one that appeared in The Irish Times here.
The narrator of Milkman disrupts the status quo not through being political, heroic or violently opposed, but because she is original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique: different. The same can be said of this book (The Guardian)
We would like to remind you that MILKMAN has won the most important literary prizes and awards, including: the Booker Prize 2018, the National Book Critics Circle Award 2019, the Orwell Prize For Political Fiction 2019, the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize 2019, the International Dublin Literary Award 2020 and the Lee Hochul Literary Prize For Peace 2024.
