Excerpt from Milkman by Anna Burns, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He appeared one day, driving up in one of his cars as I was walking along reading Ivanhoe. Often I would walk along reading books. I didn't see anything wrong with this but it became something else to be added as further proof against me. 'Reading-while-walking' was definitely on the list.

'You're one of the who's-it girls, aren't you? So-and-so was your father, wasn't he? Your brothers, thingy, thingy, thingy and thingy, used to play in the hurley team, didn't they? Hop in. I'll give you a lift.'

This was said casually, the passenger door already opening. I was startled out of my reading. I had not heard this car drive up. Had not seen before either, this man at the wheel of it. He was leaning over, looking out at me, smiling and friendly by way of being obliging. But by now, by age eighteen, 'smiling, friendly and obliging' always had me straight on the alert. It was not the lift itself. People who had cars here often would stop and offer lifts to others going into and out of the area. Cars were not in abundance then and public transport, because of bombscares and hijackings, was intermittently withdrawn. Kerb-crawling too, may have been a term recognised, but it was not recognised as a practice. Certainly I had never come across it. Anyway, I did not want a lift. That was generally speaking. I liked walking – walking and reading, walking and thinking. Also specifically speaking, I did not want to get in the car with this man. I did not know how to say so though, as he wasn't being rude and he knew my family for he'd named the credentials, the male people of my family, and I couldn't be rude because he wasn't being rude. So I hesitated, or froze, which was rude. 'I'm walking,' I said. 'I'm reading,' and I held up the book, as if Ivanhoe should explain the walking, the necessity for walking. 'You can read in the car,' he said, and I don't remember how I responded to that. Eventually he laughed and said, 'No bother. Don't you be worryin'. Enjoy your book there,' and he closed the car door and drove away.

First time that was all that happened – and already a rumour started up. Eldest sister came round to see me because her husband, my now forty-one-year-old brother-in-law, had sent her round to see me. She was to apprise me and to warn me. She said I had been seen talking with this man.

'Fuck off,' I said. 'What's that mean – been seen? Who's been seein' me? Your husband?'

'You'd better listen to me,' she said. But I wouldn't listen – because of him and his double standards, and because of her putting up with them. I didn't know I was blaming her, had been blaming her, for his long-term remarks to me. Didn't know I was blaming her for marrying him when she didn't love him and couldn't possibly respect him, for she must have known, how could she not, all the playing around he got up to himself.

She tried to persist in advising me to behave myself, in warning me that I was doing myself no favours, that of all the men to take up with— But that was enough. I became incensed and cursed some more because she didn't like cursing so that was the only way to get her out of a room. I then shouted out the window after her that if that coward had anything to say to me then he was to come round and say it to me himself. That was a mistake: to have been emotional, to have been seen and heard to be emotional, shouting out the window, over the street, allowing myself to be pulled into the momentum. Usually I managed not to fall into that. But I was angry. I had just so much anger – at her, for being the wee wife, for doing always exactly what he told her to, and at him, for trying to put his own contemptibleness over onto me. Already I could feel my stubbornness, my 'mind your own business' arising. Unfortunately whenever that happened, I'd pretty much turn perverse, refuse to learn from experience and cut off my nose to spite my face. As for the rumour of me and the milkman, I dismissed it without considering it. Intense nosiness about everybody had always existed in the area. Gossip washed in, washed out, came, went, moved on to the next target. So I didn't pay attention to this love affair with the milkman. Then he appeared again – this time on foot as I was running in the parks with the lower and upper waterworks.

Excerpted from Milkman. Copyright © 2018 by Anna Burns. Reproduced with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota, www.graywolfpress.org.