"Set among the (unspecified) menace of 1970s Belfast, this winner of the 2018 Man Booker prize is a visionary jamboree of inventiveness that resonates with the #MeToo movement."
The unnamed narrator of this remarkable novel is a vulnerable, bookish eighteen-year-old who lives in a close-knit community beset by sectarian violence. Harassed by an older man she calls Milkman, she’s compelled to keep her encounter with this sinister figure a deeply buried secret. She’s isolated, silenced, and must remain silent, and it’s this that cuttingly resonates with the #MeToo movement, and also with the situation of many teenage girls whose early experiences of womanhood all too often involve fear, shame and secrecy.
Many reviews of this novel speak of its “challenging” nature, its “difficult” experimentalism, but whether a reader finds it to be “difficult” very much depends as to how one engages with the narrator. It took a little while to fall in step with her rhythm, but I found her stream-of-consciousness voice compelling and richly rewarding. Sharp on the psychology of small communities and the repercussions of inaction, and quirkily comic to boot, this is an exhaustively exceptional novel.
Liberty fabric covered editions bring classics from the Faber backlist together with important modern titles, putting them in conversation and celebrating both the history and the future of Faber & Faber. 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. In 2019, Milkman, winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize, will be reissued with a bespoke Liberty fabric cover, created uniquely for Anna Burns; Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar will be reissued as a hardback featuring a Liberty fabric from the year of the novel's first publication (1963). ABOUT THE FABRIC Liberty Open Call 2019 winner Duncan Grant's Small Town print is one of his series of 'smalltown' ink designs, drawing inspiration from the homes and billowing chimneys of Grant's childhood in Gravesend. Born out of a doodling style, the design features a world that is by turns childlike, slightly abstract and colourfully simplified
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