![]() ![]() And although the book’s setting is clearly Northern Ireland in the 1970s, in a city that is probably but by no means unambiguously Belfast, the names of places (neighborhoods, streets, landmarks) are similarly withheld. ![]() Nobody in these pages gets a name: Her siblings are “first sister,” “second sister,” “third brother” her love interest is “maybe-boyfriend,” while he refers to her as “maybe-girlfriend” her best friend is “longest friend from primary school,” and so on. From the opening sentence-“The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died”-Burns’ narrator, herself unnamed, signals her obstinate refusal of proper nouns. ![]() The foregoing is as irreducibly Irish as it is absurd, but I begin with it for the reason that this politicized business of names turns out to be central to Milkman itself. ![]()
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