Congratulations to Anna Burns! Her book Milkman has won this year’s Man Booker Prize!
Here is a bit about the book:
In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes ‘interesting’. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous.
Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.
The book is available from Faber & Faber in the U.K. Graywolf will be publishing the book here in the U.S.
I enjoyed reading this novel and I was struck, among other things, by the introduction of the Tablets girl who poisons the eighteen – year-old narrator, accusing her of having been responsible for her death as well as for the deaths of twenty-three other women: “she meant a past incarnation sometime during the seventeenth century and she gave dates and times…” I think that this episode which occurs in Chapter Five is meant to add to the eeriness of the atmosphere.