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Ratings: ★★★★★ (5/5)
Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Northern Irish Literature

Book Review:
''Milkman: Anna Burns's Extraordinary, Man Booker Prize-Winning Masterpiece''

Anna Burns's ''Milkman'' is an extraordinary novel, a work of stunning originality and power that deservedly won the Man Booker Prize in 2018. Set in an unnamed city during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, it is a story of gossip, hearsay, silence, and deliberate deafness, a tale of inaction with enormous consequences.

The novel is narrated by ''middle sister,'' an eighteen-year-old woman trying to navigate the dangerous and claustrophobic world in which she lives. In this community, to be interesting is to be noticed, and to be noticed is dangerous. Middle sister is already interesting for her habit of reading while walking, a transgression that marks her as different. But when she becomes the object of attention of a powerful and menacing figure known only as ''Milkman,'' her life becomes a nightmare of suspicion, rumor, and fear.

Burns's prose is utterly distinctive: a stream of consciousness that is by turns funny, frightening, and profound. She captures the paranoia and oppression of life in a community where everyone is watching everyone else, where silence is survival, and where the smallest deviation from the norm can have devastating consequences. The narrative voice is unique, with its long, looping sentences and its refusal to name names, creating a sense of both intimacy and dislocation.

The book has been hailed as a masterpiece. The Man Booker Prize judges called it ''stunning'' and ''a wholly original take on Ireland in the time of the Troubles through the mind of a young girl.'' The Irish Times praised it as ''impressive,'' confirming Burns as ''one of our rising literary stars.'' The Guardian described it as ''excellent, original, funny, disarmingly oblique and unique: different.'' The Irish Independent called it ''an astute, exquisite account of Northern Ireland's social landscape... a potent and urgent book.''