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No Bones (Paperback)

by Anna Burns (Author) "The Troubles started on a Thursday ..." (more)
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Paperback: 336 pages
  • Publisher: Flamingo (15 April 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0006552382
  • ISBN-13: 978-0006552383
  • Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 12.8 x 2.2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 435,835 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk 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

'Fresh, original shot through with energy and drama right from the start' The Times 'Amelia Lovett is just an ordinary little girl caught up in extraordinary circumstances. No Bones tracks the tragi-comic fortunes of the Lovett family of Belfast - the shrewdly mad mother; malevolent Mick; and dreamy Amelia, our narrator, who records their antics over the years. Anna Burns recreates the dark days beautifully and evokes the spirit of the times with compassion and understanding No Bones gives an insight into a difficult and dangerous period of our history from a refreshing point of view and speaks the truth in a way that only a child can do.' Irish News 'The use of language is stunning, powerful and controlled the story of Amelia's struggle for sanity is compelling.' Daily Telegraph '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.' Martina Devlin, Irish Independent
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The Troubles started on a Thursday. Read the first page
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Customer Reviews

12 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.0 out of 5 stars (12 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Scary,funny,mad,deeply moving:Tarantino meets KeystoneCops, 30 April 2002
By A Customer
Amelia is a survivor, so is Vincent. When life becomes unbearable as it does in Northern Ireland, and in the rest of the world for that matter, the residents of Ardoyne reach for time tested substances and behaviours to block the pain. Alcohol, drugs, food, sex, violence and madness will all do the trick. Amelia's block of choice is maximum consumption of alcohol with minimum intake of food. In this second obsession she is assisted by her classmate Bernie who has the balance of caloric inputs and outputs down to a fine mathematical science. Vincent drinks as well but prefers to live in a world of his own making, guided only by his inner advisor, the ever-present and helpful, Mr. Hunch. As the sensitive RUC man said to his superior, " No need to bother with him Sir, He's a headcase, a spacer, a one hundred percent nutter, a boy with built-in speakers, a total balloon."

Life starts bearing down on Amelia early. Even as we meet her in the first story as a seven year old with an interesting collection of caterpillars, she is living through nightly sieges on her home. This is followed by a shy interest in a long lost cousin, who is briefly found and befriended but then rejected by her family and subsequently killed by persons unknown. But perhaps most traumatic of all, is her loss by theft, and by a family member of her treasured hoard of rubber bullets.

We see the world through Amelia's eyes. She describes it as best she can, with childlike simplicity at first and then through the unconsciousness of addiction. It is a world where cars express the personalities of their owners and conversations with armed shrubberies are not uncommon. The world that emerges has surreal elements but a real emotional underpinning. Amelia records the cruel and the kind, the brutal and the banal. Despite their underwhelming minority, it is the small acts of kindness and the poignant moments we remember.

A nurse contrives to keep Vincent discreetly supplied with the red pens he requires to express on his own body, the horror of his father's murder.

A security guard with storm trooper tendencies, is transformed in a moment into an angel of mercy on Amelia's behalf.

A ghost searches in vain for an image of her live self in the house of her old friend, Amelia.

As a life strategy, survival is not enough. Amelia asks at one point, "Why can't I have what I want?", and although it is framed in the context of tinned beans versus Special K breakfast cereal, it is still a very good question. It is a question that Amelia keeps asking and on matters of greater and greater import.
Can Amelia stop surviving and start living in the real world. Can Vincent come to terms with his past so it stops intruding on his present? Is it possible to move from a position of "Nothing is possible", to one where "Nothing is impossible"? We passionately hope so.

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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars chilling and funny, 13 Aug 2002
How often do you get to put together the words chilling and funny? But this book is both and does it well. It enmeshes you so deeply in Belfast, during the Troubles, than when you look up you eye everyone to see if they are IRA or British soldiers. I was amazed by the author's control over voice as perspective shifts from the protagonist to other characters and was moved by the horror that is drawn so well by the young voice recounting it. Every Brit and every Irish American should read it to discover and uncover the not-so-secret secrets of the Troubles that we all scoffed at. There was nothing to scoff at. The ghosts come back to haunt you.
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars anna burns, no bones, 7 May 2003
By roxy walsh (London United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
reading it was a revelation, there were women in this book that survived ‘the troubles’ unpatronised: Vomiting,bleeding, ranting and fighting, but unsainted and unremarkably sexed. Having been brought up in the leafy sub-suburban countryside of Northern Ireland the Ardoyne of the 70’s is as foreign to me as to most people. The wee milly’s in Bay City Roller trousers a species apart - as comprehensible as Peckham kids might seem to kids in Chelsea. I left Northern Ireland quite painlessly at 17 whilst the narrator of the book left it later, much shat-upon and still alive. She visits from London and still has people she cares about there, hovers uncomfortably between being patronizing and getting sucked back in. It is a great book about someone managing to remain human. It’s an unusual book in that the narrator is emotionally feasible and ordinarily female. It is also very Northern Irish and read-aloud slapstick in uncomfortable places.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars disturbing and funny
Not quite what I expected,which was a close following of a child in the Irish troubles.
We are introduced to the Lovett family... Read more
Published 29 days ago by palace pier

5.0 out of 5 stars Scabrous
A wonderful book, heart-rending yet totally unsentimental. It tells the story of Amelia Boyd Lovett, growing up in Northern Ireland, a Catholic girl in a city awash in... Read more
Published 2 months ago by E. Shaw

3.0 out of 5 stars torn
I found this novel strangely disturbing. Which I guess I was meant to. It starts out with a witty and insightful glimpse into life in the Ardoyne part of Belfast during the... Read more
Published on 27 Aug 2003 by rosie_grace

3.0 out of 5 stars Starts Great but Loses Focus
Few things can turn an abstract conflict halfway across the world into reality than to see it through the eyes of a child growing up in the middle of it. Read more
Published on 7 Mar 2003 by A. Ross

1.0 out of 5 stars One of the worst books I have ever read!
It is not very often that I am unable to finish a book- in fact I can't remember the last time until now!! Read more
Published on 19 Jul 2002 by AMT

4.0 out of 5 stars No Bones
A great, great book that the first-time author should be exceptionally proud of.
The subject is a very ordinary person caught up in extraodinary cicumstances, and her story is... Read more
Published on 21 Jun 2002 by samuelra

5.0 out of 5 stars About families, secrets, food, bad sex - a must-have read
...The language zings and crackles with life, the subject-matter is truly scary but never gratuitously so, and the combination of black humour with characters you really care... Read more
Published on 7 May 2002

5.0 out of 5 stars Scary,funny,mad,deeply moving:Tarantino meets KeystoneCops
Amelia is a survivor, so is Vincent. When life becomes unbearable as it does in Northern Ireland, and in the rest of the world for that matter, the residents of Ardoyne reach for... Read more
Published on 3 Jul 2001

5.0 out of 5 stars funny, fast and deadly serious - a great new voice
I really rate this one... For me it cuts through the cliches in a way which could upset a whole lot of people, from the IRA and the British Army to feminists, families and... Read more
Published on 20 Jun 2001

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