Milkman

Middle sister is eighteen, lives in an unnamed city during an unnamed conflict that is unmistakably Belfast in the 1970s, and reads nineteenth-century novels while walking, which the district considers deviant. She is noticed by a man called the milkman, a senior figure in the renouncers-of-the-state, who does not touch her and does not threaten her and simply appears beside her car, knowing where she runs and where her maybe-boyfriend works. Nothing happens, and everything follows from it, because the community decides she is having an affair and the rumour becomes more real than the facts. Burns writes without a single proper name, in a voice that circles, qualifies and doubles back, and the effect is exact: this is how a person thinks in a place where saying anything plainly is dangerous. Around middle sister are her mother's campaign to marry her off, the wee sisters, the woman who poisons people, the beyond-the-pales and the tablets girl, and a state and a paramilitary organisation who agree on the surveillance of women even where they agree on nothing else. It is very funny, and its comedy is the pressurised kind, and it captures the texture of intimidation better than almost anything written about the Troubles.