The blurb

In this unnamed city, to be interesting is to be dangerous. Middle sister is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her trouble and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes ‘interesting’. The last thing she ever wanted to be. to be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous…

Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.

The author

Anna Burns was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is the author of two novels, No Bones and Little Constructions, and of the novella Mostly Hero. No Bones won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She lives in East Sussex, England.

Brunch on a Saturday
Fried eggs and bacon
Flat white on the side
if I’m not mistaken

On New Year’s day, because snow was forecast, I went out for an hour and shot 122 pictures of ice on our stream from the waterfall to about two hundred feet downstream. A bit extreme do you think? (Probably not, if you are a photographer.) Once the snow fell, the opportunity would be past. Wrapped in down, I endure frozen fingers and feet because ice captures my imagination and it is ephemeral. It changes constantly, growing or shrinking with the fluctuation in temperature. A warm rainy weekend before Christmas cleared the stream of previous ice, so with the drop in temperatures a few days prior to New Year’s, new formations were growing steadily. Suddenly frigid temperatures produce ice quickly, clear as glass, with edges fluted like crystal and these I love the most. All sorts of exquisite patterns form in and under clear glazing. There are chandeliers, mounds, tiers, feathers…

Very cool ice formations today (pun intended)! It has been so frigid that what I call “ice feathers” have grown especially large and haven’t melted even at mid-day.

Even the icicles have feathers!  Many parts of the stream that were open a few days ago froze to black ice and needles of ice formed on top. So striking!

The above photo looks galactic.

Needles and feathers!

Even the bubbles in the stream froze.

The temperature is rising and rain is forecast, so the above ‘art exhibit’ is due to change yet again. For the past few weeks, the weather has been wildly yo-yo-ing up and down, making for diverse ice formations on the river and stream. It’s lovely for walking about in Nature, but it is not so great when it comes to driving!

Last Sunday’s rain storm raised the water level on the river by about six feet, breaking up the frozen ice into large chunks that were four to twelve inches thick. Flowing downstream in the flood, some of these icebergs stuck in an eddy in the bend of the river below the bluff and were left in stacks up to five feet deep when the water receded.

This one deposited high above the water on the rocks, is about a foot deep, four feet wide and five feet long. The branches of multiflora rose hips to the right gives you some sense of scale.

Each floe had a varied grain depending on how cold it was when each layer froze and how clear or turbulent was the water at that time. Some were the loveliest aquamarine color, while others were crystal clear, solid snow-white, in-between opaque or muddy brown.

This piece looked like the prow of a boat…

I stumbled on this book by way of its sharing the 2016 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction Prize shortlist with Lucy Treloar’s Salt Creek.  This is not a prize that’s normally on my radar, but I was interested to see that the shortlist included other novels I’d read:

• Sweet Caress by William Boyd (Bloomsbury) (abandoned)
• A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale (Tinder Press)
• Mrs Engels by Gavin McCrea (Scribe UK) (see my review)
• End Games in Bordeaux by Allan Massie (Quartet) (I want this, but haven’t sourced it yet.)
• Tightrope by Simon Mawer (Little,Brown) (see my review)
• Salt Creek by Lucy Treloar (Picador Australia) (see my review)

The wonderful Kingston library came up trumps with the Boyd and the Gale, and they seemed like ideal books to complement my reading of Xavier Herbert’s  Poor Fellow My Country, a book so heavy (literally) and so dense with…