Milkman (Burns) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
A “challenging, experimental” novel that might be easier to understand if read aloud has brought Northern Ireland its first success in the Man Booker prize. Milkman by Anna Burns was the “unanimous” choice of the panel of jurors, whose chairman, Kwame Anthony Appiah, said that it was “enormously rewarding…if you persist with it.”
David Sanderson - Times (UK)


[A] strange and intriguing novel that tackles the Northern Ireland conflict from the perspective of an 18-year-old girl.... Milkman calls to mind several seminal works of Irish literature.... But for all the comparisons, Milkman has its own energy, its own voice.... The narrator...is original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique: different. The same can be said of this book.
Claire Kilroy - Guardian (UK)


Eccentric and oddly beguiling.… What makes it memorable is the funny, alienated, common-sensical voice of middle sister, who refuses to join in the madness.
Sunday Times (UK)


Milkman is delivered in a breathless, hectic, glorious torrent.… It’s an astute, exquisite account of Northern Ireland’s social landscape.… A potent and urgent book, with more than a hint of barely contained fury.
Irish Independent


I haven’t stopped talking about Anna Burns’s astonishing Milkman. The voice is dazzling, funny, acute.… Like all great writing it invents its own context, becomes its own universe.
Eoin McNamee - Irish Times


From the opening page her words pull us into the daily violence of her world—threats of murder, people killed by state hit squads—while responding to the everyday realities of her life as a young woman.
Kwame Anthony Appiah - Chair, Man Booker Prize panel


[A]n acute, chilling, and often wry portrait of a young woman—and a district—under siege.… There is a touch of James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus in the… narrator of this claustrophobic yet strangely buoyant tale.… This is an unforgettable novel.
Publishers Weekly