No Bones

Amelia Lovett is an ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances. Or maybe just an extraordinary girl in ordinary circumstances. It's hard to tell.

It's hard to tell anything when ordinary is midnight raids of your home; ordinary is ten-year-olds collecting rubber bullets as keepsakes; ordinary is schoolgirls bringing guns into schoolyards. Living on an unremarkable street in a town where violence is absurdly ordinary is so hard that all you can do is laugh -- or die. If Amelia is not only to survive but to live, it will be a miracle, a miracle no religion in that city is capable of inducing or sanctioning. But it could happen -- if at a price. "Who would have thought being ordinary could cost a person so much?"

'No Bones' is a punch to the stomach, a shattering and blackly funny debut which announces Anna Burns as a dangerous, potently gifted new writer.