She has a job and a boyfriend she might move in with, studies French, and helps her mother with her three precocious little sisters. It’s “the great Seventies hatred,” ostensibly in Belfast (where Burns was born), where “two warring religions” have endured “eight hundred years of the political problems.” Daringly, the novel’s 18-year-old narrator, known only as “middle sister,” claims that “every weekday, rain or shine, gunplay or bombs, stand-off or riots, preferred to walk home reading latest book.” Her father’s dead. With an immense rush of dazzling language, Burns submerges readers beneath the tensions of life in a police state. In her third novel, which won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, Burns ( Little Constructions, 2007, etc.) writes again about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, delivering a blistering feminist perspective on a community at war.
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