Jonathan Ball Publishers are thrilled to share that Anna Burns has won the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her exceptional novel Milkman.

• Read an excerpt from Milkman here!

Praise for Milkman

‘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 this book.’
– Guardian

In Milkman no one is named. They’re given title by their relations to each other (maybe-boyfriend), or their positioning or trajectory in society (the man who didn’t love anybody; tablets girl). Technique this good demands virtuosity, and she has it. The mind is restless, never settles for what’s easy. A question about voice comes back as a reflection on character.’
– Irish Times

‘A brilliantly realised extended metaphor for a totalitarian state …While Milkman is a work of timely universality, it is also a distinctly Irish novel, a darkly mirthful satire with a twist of Beckettian melancholy and an anarchic touch of Swift … Crackles with intellectual verve and droll verbosity … Burns supplies precise and richly observed back stories for her characters, a vital part of her establishing of a living community and a history … Burns builds an intense picture of a society under siege, in a state of fugue, subject to surreptitious forces of oppression.’
– New Statesman

‘Profound, punchy, powerful prose … A tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness, it’s thought-provoking stuff.’
– Sunday Telegraph

About Milkman

This beautiful and painful novel by Orange Prize shortlisted Anna Burns blends shades of early Edna O’Brien with Eimear McBride’s exquisite ability to capture voice.

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.

About the author

Anna Burns was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is the author of two novels, No Bones and Little Constructions, and of the novella, Mostly Hero. No Bones won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She lives in East Sussex, England.

Categories Fiction International

Tags Anna Burns Awards Jonathan Ball Publishers Man Booker Prize Milkman News