Milkman by Anna BurnsMan Booker prize
"Milkman is a novel set in the Belfast of the uneasy 1990s but the city, like the lead protagonist, is never named. And Burns’s agenda is not to unpack the dreary tribal squabbles that so characterised Troubles-era Northern Ireland; rather she is working in an altogether more interesting milieu, seeking answers to the big questions about identity, love, enlightenment and the meaning of life for a young woman on the verge of adulthood." from Irish Times