Milkman books6/28/2023 ![]() She is "being followed, being spied upon, photographed, misperceived, encircled, anticipated." Gradually the fear invades every aspect of her life. "I did not know intuition and repugnance counted, did not know I had a right not to like, not to have to put up with, anybody and everybody coming near." "At the time, age eighteen, having been brought up in a hair-trigger society where the ground rules were - if no physically violent touch was laid upon you, and no outright verbal insults were being levelled at you, and no taunting looks in the vicinity either, then nothing was happening, so how could you be under attack from something that wasn't there?" she says. ![]() ![]() She says no, but he begins trailing her, insinuating himself, making oblique threats. There were the general Troubles, of course, but middle sister's specific troubles begin when a powerful paramilitary figure called the milkman (he's not a milkman) starts offering her rides home. "These were knife-edge times, primal times, with everybody suspicious of everybody," says middle sister, the narrator of Anna Burns's brutally intelligent novel Milkman, set amid the Troubles in 1970's Northern Ireland. ![]() Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Milkman Author Anna Burns ![]()
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