"Milkman" by Belfast author Anna Burns is the July 2025 selection for the IrishCentral Book Club.
Each month, we will pick a new Irish book or a great book by an Irish author and celebrate the amazing ability of the Irish to tell a good story for the IrishCentral Book Club.
Published by Faber in 2018, Anna Burns' award-winning "Milkman" blends shades of early Edna O’Brien with Eimear McBride’s exquisite ability to capture voice.
"Milkman" is the winner of the Man Booker Prize 2018, as well as the International Dublin Literary Award 2020.
You can listen to Burns read an extract from her "Milkman" here, courtesy of Faber & Faber:
Synopsis of "Milkman"
In an unnamed city, where to be interesting is dangerous, an eighteen-year-old woman has attracted the unwanted and unavoidable attention of a powerful and frightening older man, ‘Milkman’.
In this community, where suggestions quickly become fact, where gossip and hearsay can lead to terrible consequences, what can she do to stop a rumour once it has started?
Milkman is persistent, the word is spreading, and she is no longer in control ...
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Reviews of "Milkman"
"'Milkman' is extraordinary. I’ve been reading passages aloud for the pleasure of hearing it. It’s frightening, hilarious, wily and joyous all at the same time." - Lisa McInerney, author of "The Glorious Heresies"
"A triumph of voice ... darkly hilarious," Justine Jordan, Guardian Books of the Year
"The narrator of 'Milkman' disrupts the status quo not through being political, heroic, or violently opposed, but because she is original, funny, disarmingly oblique, and unique: different. The same can be said of the book." - Claire Gilroy, Guardian.
"A darkly funny novel about Seventies Belfast that leaves words ominously unspoken." - Cal Revely-Calder, Daily Telegraph.
"'Milkman' is delivered in a breathless, hectic, glorious torrent. The pace doesn't let up for a single moment ... A potent and urgent book, with more than a hint of barely contained fury." - Irish Independent.
About Anna Burns
Anna Burns was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is the author of three novels - "No Bones," "Little Constructions," and "Milkman" - and of the novella "Mostly Hero." "No Bones" won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. "Milkman" has, to date, won the Man Booker Prize in 2018, the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, and the International Dublin Literary Award 2020, and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize and the Rathbone's Folio Prize.
(*Synopsis, reviews, and biographical information provided by Faber.)
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