“There was an awful lot of violence, shocking amount of violence, apart from the Troubles,” Burns says when asked about her childhood. (A writer and former senior member of Sinn Fein dismissed her debut novel, No Bones, as a “misanthropic portrayal of the nationalist people” of Ardoyne.) The Troubles started when she was six, and that forms the backdrop for her novels. “I’d go over to the house so I had all that rowdiness, which was important, then I’d go back to my aunt’s for the quietness,” she says. She lived with her aunt across the road from her parents and six siblings. He read it in a bad Ulster accent.īurns denies “Middle Sister” is her – “All we share is the reading while walking,” she says – but it is easy for a reader to jump to conclusions based on Burns’s life story.īurns, 56, grew up in a working class family in Ardoyne, a mainly Roman Catholic district of Belfast. “There are moments when I had to read it out loud, just for the pleasure of it, the way it sounds,” he said. But Milkman also stood out thanks to Burns’s unique voice.
Kwame Anthony Appiah, the chairman of this year’s Booker judges, said its focus on men abusing power and what happens when rumours spiral out of control gave it wide resonance.
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