Milkman by Anna Burns

This book was the Booker Prize winner for 2018, which means that it is exceptionally well written, but perhaps not all that easily read, if the past predicts the future.
The writer is from Northern Ireland, but she lives in England now.  this strange and intriguing novel that tackles the Northern Ireland conflict from the perspective of an 18-year-old girl with no interest in the politics. She keeps her head down, literally, by burying it in a book while she walks.  In so doing, she has marked herself as  other or different, and not in a good way.  That attracted the unwanted sexual attention of a senior paramilitary figure, the milkman, who has marked her as his property. It soon becomes common knowledge that she is having an affair with this older married man, which makes her vulnerable.  The restrained irritation and propensity to violence of men who believe that they have the right to a woman, regardless of her desires towards them is a tension that runs convincingly through the book.  Well written.