The Related Discourses of History and Fiction: The Case of Anna Burns' Novels about Ardoyne

Northern Irish Post-Agreement culture is still struggling to reconcile with its troubled past. The situation following the implementation of Brexit legislation has brought to the surface episodes that seemed buried and forgotten. This is why Anna Burns’ 2018 Man Booker Prize-winning novel, Milkman, has produced a revolution in recent Irish literary studies. Milkman has acted as a reminder of the relevance of addressing sectarian strife from all perspectives while recovering her two previous novels, No Bones and Little Constructions, for the public. This article examines the usefulness of Burns’ narrative in revisiting the past and the renewed relevance of the issues it addresses thanks to the new feminist impulse and the controversy of the ‘memory wars’. It compares two complementary ways of addressing that past, Burns’ fiction and the oral memory deposited in Ardoyne: The Untold Truth (2002), to highlight the validity of literature as a tool for engaging in a cultural dialogue that contributes to the process of community healing.