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How do you write convincingly about trauma, about its impact on daily life and its repercussions, in a way that gets a reader to empathise, without feeling repelled, or running the risk of being desensitised if the depiction is too relentless?

Anna Burns achieves this seemingly impossible balance with the exquisite Milkman, which is not only one of the funniest books I have read in a long time, but also one of the most harrowing. Two examples:

‘God, we’re plastered,�� they said, and then they, including sister, fell over the ornamental hedge. Sister exploded into advanced asterisks, into percentage marks, crossword symbol signs, ampersands, circumflexes, hash keys, dollar signs, all that ‘If You See Kay�� blue french language.

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At last they considered they’d done so by coming up with the invention of rape with subsections �� meaning that in our district there could now be full rape, three-quarter rape, half rape or one-quarter rape �� which our renouncers said was better than rape divided by two �� as in ‘rape�� and ‘not rape�� which, they added, were the acceptable categories in most fiefdoms as well as in the burlesque courts of the occupiers. ‘Streaks ahead therefore we are,�� they maintained, and they meant in terms of modernity, of conflict resolution and of gender progressiveness.

This book also has one of the best opening lines I have ever read: “The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.�� It is an outrageous line that taunts the reader with its noirish improbability; yet it informs everything that goes forward.

A lot has been made about the nameless setting of this book �� which by inference is the period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland �� and the fact that, instead of names, the protagonists go by sobriquets such as Maybe-Boyfriend, Somebody McSomebody, or the titular Milkman (there is both a lower- and upper-case version of this character).

You’d think that such an obviously postmodern literary flourish would add a cartoonish quality to the writing; instead it plays perfectly into Burns’s strategy of interiorising the psychological trauma and PTSD that inflicts this little community.

Maybe Girlfriend �� with her ‘beyond-the-pale�� habit of reading while walking, and then only nineteenth-century novels at that because she detests the twentieth �� is a beautifully-evoked character of such nuance and depth I was absolutely mesmerised by her.

Having evoked the ‘p�� word, postmodernism, a lot has also been made about how ‘difficult�� this novel is to read. Being an interior kind of monologue, the chapters are really long, with few paragraph breaks. I must confess to reading this in small chunks to prevent reader fatigue.

But the effort pays off handsomely. There is a striking plot twist at the end that is quite devastating in terms of its psychological impact on Maybe Girlfriend, and one that in hindsight Burns does foreshadow quite delicately. What I’m saying is: Give this book a chance.

Burns has an exquisite turn of phrase and sense of comedic timing. You will soon get used to her particular style of writing, and become immersed in the little community she brings to life in such an extraordinary fashion.