No Bones - Softcover

Burns, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0002261804 ISBN 13: 9780002261807

Publisher: Flamingo, 2001

Synopsis

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 Mail

This 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.

About this title

Review:

No Bones, Anna Burns' magnificent debut, is a heartbreaking but astonishingly funny account of growing up in Belfast during the "Troubles". Without meaning to diminish this wonderful and inventive work, it's possibly more accurate to describe it as a series of interlocking stories rather as a novel. At its centre is Amelia Lovett, a naïve, sensitive girl who matures, although never losing her youthful incredulity, as the book progresses. Her, often tragic life story is recounted through an array of characters, vernacular voices and episodes that with mordant humour track the sheer brutality of the era. Burns unflinchingly portrays the casualness, even banality, of the violence. The nine year-old Amelia easily drifts from collecting buttons to plastic bullets; teenage girls shoot each other in the playground; wayward youths are kneecapped and even a walk home from a disco can result in a "protracted, grisly and truly awful end."

What Burns manages to capture, through comic exaggeration, is a real sense of how fragile the boundaries of normality are. The sectarian killings are matched by equally senseless domestic feuds and conflicts. Amelia's mother's observation that "she could see that beating the crap out of her sister was one thing; kicking an IRA man to death or nearly was another" offers a measure of just how distorted their values have become. Amelia reacts to the madness around her by internalising the violence, choosing to harm herself rather than others; first by becoming an anorexic and then an alcoholic--dealt with in a mercilessly hilarious chapter where all of the booze-addled characters continually forget what they have been talking about. The schizophrenic Vincent however, retreats further into actual madness creating a fantastical carnival city with "Come and Get Your Dead" stalls and, all too real, imaginary gunmen. It's achingly sad but as so often in this magically realised book, the mingling of tragedy and surreal comedy proves deeply affecting. Burns has produced a compassionate, bitterly acute, witty portrait of the darkest days of Northern Ireland's history. No Bones could well emerge as Belfast's Dubliners.--Travis Elborough

Review:

'Not only hilarious but also terribly tragic and awful and human and wonderful... No Bones is the best book I've read for ages. The world Burns creates is utterly convincing and surreal at the same time. I love the writing, the way she rolls the words around... No Bones is absolutely fantastic, and explores really exciting territory... the tone and timbre of the novel feel quite different to anything I've read before.' Julia Darling

'A chilling recognition that most survived the Troubles intact but some people will never be the same again...This account of a girl's life growing up in Belfast during the Troubles, which examines madness and sanity and questions our interpretation of both, is scary. Scarily well written, too... No Bones tears chunks out of our Peace Process comfort blankets. For it questions how a peaceful, mundane existence can be superimposed on a society inured over decades to violence.' Martina Devlin, Irish Independent

‘Not only hilarious but also terribly tragic and awful and human and wonderful ... No Bones is absolutely fantastic, quite different from anything I’ve read before’ Julia Darling, author of Crocodile Tears

About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0002261804
• ISBN 13: 9780002261807
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 336