In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous.

Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.

Anna Burns was born in Belfast in 1962. She moved to London in 1987.
Her first novel, No Bones, is a gripping account of a girl's life growing up in Belfast during the Troubles. Among the novels that depict the Troubles within the Literature of Northern Ireland, No Bones is considered an important work, and has been compared to Dubliners by James Joyce for its capture of the everyday language of the people of Belfast. No Bones won the 2001 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize presented by the Royal Society of Literature for the best regional novel of the year in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

Her second novel, Little Constructions, was published in 2007 by Fourth Estate (an imprint of HarperCollins). It is a darkly comic and ironic tale centered on a woman from a tightly-knit family of criminals on a mission of retribution.

In 2018, Burns won the Man Booker Prize for her novel Milkman making her the first Northern Irish writer to win the award.After the ceremony, Graywolf Press announced that it will publish "Milkman" in the U.S. on December 11, 2018.Milkman is an experimental novel in which the narrator is an unnamed 18 year old girl known as “middle sister”, who is being pursued by a much older paramilitary figure, the milkman.