Milkman Study Guide

Anna Burns grew up in Ardoyne, a primarily working class and Irish Catholic region of Belfast. There, she attended primary and secondary, growing up during the Troubles, a tumultuous period in Northern Irish history. Burns’s upbringing would have an immense impact on her future writing, including her most famous and most recent novel, Milkman (2018). Burns lived in Belfast until 1987, when she moved to London. Burns published her first novel, No Bones, in 2001, The novel follows a young girl growing up in Belfast during the Troubles. No Bones was a moderate success at the time and has become known for its ability to capture the everyday language in Belfast. Burns followed No Bones with Little Constructions (2007), her only novel that does not explicitly deal with the Troubles. Like Milkman, Little Constructions is a seriocomic exploration of the nature of violence and power. Burn’s most recent novel, Milkman, won her the prestigious Man Booker Award in 2018.

Milkman is set during the Troubles, a period of Irish history beginning in the late 1960s and stretching until 1998, when Britain and Ireland signed the Good Friday Agreement. Primarily, the Troubles was an ethnonationalist conflict between Irish Catholics and English or English-descended Protestants. The most notable Irish paramilitary group involved in the conflict was the Irish Republic Army (IRA) which wanted Northern Ireland to leave Britain and create a united Ireland independent of British rule. Meanwhile, the Ulster Defense Association (UDA), which primarily consisted of Protestants of English descent, and the British state security forces wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of Britain. Overall, the conflict resulted in around 3,500 deaths, about half of which were civilian deaths. Although there was a clear ethnic division in the conflict, many Irish citizens disagreed with the tactics of powerful groups such as the IRA but had little room for dissent.

Milkman is a work of historical fiction focused on the Troubles, a period of social and political unrest in Northern Ireland. There are several notable works about the same subject that have come out in the last few decades including Burns’s first novel, No Bones (2001). Other significant novels dealing with the Troubles include Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man (1994) and Michael Hughes’s Country (2018). The Troubles are also regularly depicted on the stage, including Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman (2017) and Martin McDonagh’s The Lieutenant of Inishmore (2001). Milkman also contains many references to nineteenth-century novels, which middle sister reads when she walks. The most notable of these is Ivanhoe (1819), Sir Walter Scott’s famous work of historical fiction set during the Crusades.