The girl becomes severely sick, but recovers. During this meeting, the girl is poisoned by 'tablets girl,' a mentally ill local woman. When the girl meets with her 'longest friend from primary school,' her friend suggests the girl's oblivious behavior, particularly 'reading-while-walking,' has led her to become a social pariah and thus enabled the rumors. The girl becomes more withdrawn and she and maybe-boyfriend drift apart.

These rumors compound as the girl continues her relationship with her 'maybe-boyfriend,' who she has been dating for a year but struggles to commit to.Īs Milkman's stalking becomes more intense, he makes veiled threats of killing maybe-boyfriend if she does not break up with him. Rumors spread that the girl is having an affair with the married Milkman, straining her relationship with her mother and the wider community. Milkman, a high-ranking paramilitary officer, takes an interest in the girl, beginning to stalk her and offer her unwanted car rides. The narrator is an unnamed 18-year-old girl living in an unnamed city sympathetic to the republican cause. Milkman is set in Northern Ireland during the 1970s, at the height of The Troubles. As of 2019, the novel has sold in excess of 540,000 copies. The novel also won the 2018 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction, as well as the 2020 International Dublin Literary Award. Milkman won several awards, including the 2018 Booker Prize for Fiction, marking the first time a Northern Irish writer has been awarded the prize. Milkman received strongly positive reviews, with critics mostly praising the book's narration, atmosphere, humour, and its complex portrayal of Northern Irish sociopolitics. It is Burns's first novel to be published after Little Constructions in 2007, and is her third overall. Set during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, the story follows an 18-year-old girl who is harassed by an older married man known as 'the milkman' and then as 'Milkman'. Milkman is a historical psychological fiction novel written by the Northern Irish author Anna Burns. Print (hardcover, paperback), ebook, kindle, audiobook

Milkman by Anna Burns