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

I was alone and not reading this time, for I never read while running. And there he was, again out of nowhere, this time falling into step beside me where he'd never been before. Instantly we were running together and it looked as if always we were running together and again I was startled, as I would be startled by every encounter, except the last, I was to have with this man. At first he didn't speak, and I could not speak. Then he did and his talk was mid-conversation as if too, always we were mid-conversation. His words were brief and a little strained because of my pace of running, and it was of my place of work that he spoke. He knew my work – where it was, what I did there, the hours, the days and the twenty-past-eight bus I caught every morning when it wasn't being hijacked to get me into town to it. Also he made the pronouncement that I never caught this bus home. This was true. Every weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, stand-off or riots, I preferred to walk home reading my latest book. This would be a nineteenth-century book because I did not like twentieth-century books because I did not like the twentieth century. I suppose now, looking back, this milkman knew all of that as well.

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