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The story here is compelling as we see the world through the eyes of an 18-year-old young woman who, caught up in the Troubles of Northern Ireland, finds herself stalked by an I.R.A. militia figure. Even though she has another boyfriend �� or “maybe boyfriend�� as she calls him �� rumors begin to spread that she is seeing the older man, and then those rumors carry the weight of truth for much of the community. She becomes the victim of a story as much as a predator’s target.

That only scratches the surface of this, though. This is above all a tour de force of language and perspective. Burns invents an almost new language as our protagonist and narrator, Middle Sister, renders everyone vaguely anonymous through her refusal to name anyone directly. We get Wee Sisters and Third Brother-in-law and Real Milkman as characters who are an intimate part of her world and yet rendered strange at the same time.

At the same time, we see the world through the specific and defiant lens of our narrator. She’s attractive enough to have earned the notice of Milkman, the I.R.A. big-shot, yet she seems often overlooked by others. It’s a noisy, tight community where she grows up, a community where everything is defined by the partisan fighting.

In that world, she’s quiet and unassuming. She’s noted for her peculiar and troubling habit of reading as she walks. That offends most people not because it’s a sign of her being too smart or ambitious but because it suggests she’s not sufficiently alert to the ever-present danger of a world at war with itself and with the police.

For all of that, though, we see the world through her sharp and penetrating eyes. She can be withering in her assessment of one or another character, and she has a gift for mixing fresh insight with backstory so that her account never seems to lag. Burns renders her voice so fresh and rich that it feels like a master painter with inimitable brush strokes. I drifted from the story as a whole sometimes �� it’s hard not to drift in this time of our own political crisis �� but the language itself always brought me back.

Even all of that, though, the striking setting and the fresh language and perspective, falls short of describing the excellence of this work. The story itself is close to unrelenting; there isn’t much that’s funny about the Troubles in the mid-1970s. Yet, somehow, the book is full of gentle laughter.

Our narrator herself seems always to have a quiet burr of humor. The conceit of never naming anyone �� except, ironically, for the titular Milkman terrorist who turns out to have the soft and sweet surname of Milkman �� grows ever warmer in Burns exercise of it. She’s so inventive with her words that it never gets old or predictable, just ever more musical and ever funnier.

She goes through predictable conflicts with her mother, who wants only for her to marry and have children as soon as possible, and those too get ever funnier. It isn’t funny, of course, when one of the rare decent characters is shot in a case of mistaken identity. It is funny, though, when our narrator describes the transformation of her mother from frigid “pious woman�� into a middle-aged coquette who steals her daughters�� fancy underwear to impress the injured man.

I’ve seen a few people who find this one over-rated, but, as far as I’m concerned, this confirms the Booker Prize’s unerring taste. I’ve seldom found their winners to disappoint, and this one is right up there with the other great recent winners like A Brief History of Seven Killings, The Sellout, The Luminaries, and my favorite, The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

It’s inspiring to read work this great, and I look forward to checking out Burns’s earlier work.