No Bones

by Anna Burns

Paperback, no date

Description

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION 2002 A stunning debut novel about a little girl growing up in Belfast, from the author of the Man Booker Prize winning novel, Milkman. 'Marvellous: shocking, moving, evocative' Daily MailThis is sensational. This young Irishwoman is perhaps the most distinctive, the most purely gifted new writer to come to Flamingo all year. Her debut novel tracks the tragicomic fortunes of the Lovett family of Catholic Belfast - splenetically violent father; shrewdly mad mother; malevolent Mick the eldest; and dreamy, endearing Amelia, our narrator of choice. Their antics over the years (she devotes, more or less, one chapter per year from 1969 to the late 1990s) - fights, school, kickings, the IRA and the RUC vying for Most Inept Police in the City, more violence - make for black comedy of the highest order. We are up amongst the gods here: think Belfast's Angela's Ashes; think Roddy Doyle with guns; think a Northern Irish Trainspotting.… (more)

Genres

General Fiction

Collection

Fiction

Publication

Flamingo; (Reissue) edition (4 Oct. 2010) (no date)

User reviews

LibraryThing member Alirambles

As this book started out, I was immediately impressed with the way Burns sets you down right into the middle of Belfast through the eyes of an innocent child. But as the book wore on, I found the author's perspective disturbing. I expected her to hate what had happened in Belfast, but her apparent

disdain for every single character she created, including the protagonist, was inexplicable to me. Nobody seems to have any redeeming qualities. Amelia becomes less and less likeable as time goes by. So does Anna Burns' novel.

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LibraryThing member atreic

This was not the book I expected. I mean, I wasn't expecting hugs and puppies in a book about the Troubles. But the blurb sold it as a 'hilarious' ... 'speaks the truth in a way only a child can do' ... 'growing up in the Troubles', so I thought it would be a naive 'boy in the striped pyjamas' type

book.

It's a lot darker than that. It's more Catch 22, where the story shifts from horrific things that could really have happened, to horrific things that are surreal trips illustrating the feelings of all that happened. And while Amelia is young at the start of the book, it is very much coming of age - her teenage years, her first jobs, and, while I expected a book about the Troubles to be uncomfortable reading, I didn't realise how much the personal would be entwined with the political, explicit sibling rape, anorexia, dead babies...

Moving. Horrific. Disturbing. Hard to follow at times.

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