Milkman

Winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize, Milkman is an extraordinary, rhythmic, and bitingly funny exploration of a young woman’s struggle for anonymity in a society obsessed with surveillance and tribalism.

In an unnamed city—shadowed by division and unspoken rules—to be "interesting" is to be in danger. Our protagonist, known only as "middle sister," prefers to live her life in the margins, reading 19th-century novels while walking the streets to avoid the claustrophobic gaze of her community. She is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her "maybe-boyfriend" and keeping everyone in the dark about her unsettling encounters with the "Milkman," a high-ranking paramilitary figure who has begun to stalk her.

But in a place where gossip is a weapon and silence is a form of complicity, middle sister’s attempt to remain invisible fails. When rumors begin to swell and her family starts to sniff out her struggle, she becomes the one thing she never wanted to be: interesting. To be noticed is to be targeted, and as the pressure of hearsay and "deliberate deafness" mounts, she finds herself trapped in a web of inaction with devastating consequences.