
Milkman
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Narrated by:
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Bríd Brennan
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By:
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Anna Burns
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 a story of inaction with enormous consequences.
©2018 Dreamscape Media, LLC (P)2018 Dreamscape Media, LLCListeners also enjoyed...





















Editor's Pick
Winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize
"Every once in a while I like a challenge and Milkman is that in spades. But one well-worth taking on because it's oh-so-smart, and well written, and it got in my head and made me think differently. It didn't change my mind about the political and social implications of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in the '70s—but it altered how I saw the world for a while after I finished listening. The 18-year-old female protagonist may be unnamed, but boy is she a unique and brilliantly drawn character. It's through her eyes, and the unflinching performance of narrator Bríd Brennan, that I came to see what happens in a world where illogical, even absurd, lines are made between us and them—and almost no one thinks to question it."
—Tricia F., Audible Editor
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PS I'm v. glad to see that a few weeks after I wrote this, the Washington Post picked out the narrator's performance as remarkable:
"Anna Burns’s “Milkman” — winner of the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction — is a brilliant but difficult novel, one that has stymied a number of readers who experienced it in print. Set in Belfast during the 1970s amid Northern Ireland’s Troubles, it is the sardonic, sometimes free-form first-person account of a young woman being stalked by a terrorist and held in suspicion by her own community. At times challenging and slow-going to read in print, it opens itself when delivered by the actor Bríd Brennan, a native of Northern Ireland herself. (Dreamscape, 14¼ hours) She captures the dialogue’s cadence wherein much of the novel’s sense lies, renders the menace palpable, and conveys the narrator’s subtle humor with fitting understatement." Wash Post 2019 Aug 7
Masterful!
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Middle Sister has lost friends, neighbors, and siblings to the Troubles, directly and indirectly. She has tried to shut it all out. She reads while walking--serious reading, including taking notes and underlining, while walking. She's seeing a guy she calls Maybe Boyfriend, because they aren't a fully committed couple. She doesn't gossip. And she becomes interesting to an older man called Milkman. Milkman is a high-ranking Renouncer, i.e., one of the anti-government paramilitary. He's married. Suddenly everyone thinks she's having an affair with him.
This is a very good book, a completely absorbing book. It's also modern literary fiction, the genre that thinks it's not a genre, with conventions it thinks aren't genre conventions, among them not having a coherent plot. It does depart from its genre conventions, though, in that the more you learn of the characters, the more plausible and convincing they are as human beings. We grow to understand why Ma, and Eldest Daughter, and Third Brother-in-Law, and Wee Sisters (three in number, not two, as I initially thought), and Maybe Boyfriend, and Oldest Friend, have made the choices they've made.
And Middle Sister has a lot to learn about herself, and how her own choices have set her up for what happens to her in this story.
Everyone makes choices here, and the choices have consequences, and some are good and some are bad. Middle Sister, eighteen years old, has a lot to learn about herself, as well as about family, friends, and neighbors she thinks she knows everything about. It's hard to know what to say, about a story told in many ways indirectly, and in a less linear way that it seems at first. Yet this is a very compelling look at life in what is a a very strange kind of war zone, where there aren't, mostly, tanks or bombers or pitched battles, but life is very, very dangerous, and informers are everywhere.
You might not necessarily get into this story immediately. It's very much worth giving yourself the time to get into it.
Highly recommended.
I bought this audiobook.
Indirect but compelling story
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Narrator brings the story to life
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Different style of writing
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briilant
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A book that listening while reading aids the enjoyment and understanding
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Amazing book
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From DNF to Indulgence
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Well-deserved Booker
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Great book but you should read it.
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