MOSTLY HERO by Anna Burns

Anyone who has read Anna Burns’s divisive 2018 Booker Prize winner, Milkman, will know exactly what they’re in for when picking up Mostly Hero. There will be a familiar story, deconstructed, reconstructed, shone through a thousand prisms and made meta within an inch of its life. It will take the form of words of the page that you may or may not understand. The fact I still can’t decide what I thought of Milkman should probably clue you in to where I’m going with this. Like that book, Mostly Hero is a highly self-conscious subversion of a well-worn genre though this time it’s the classic superhero tale.

There’s a fair deal of lampooning at play here. The characters are mostly named for their types - hero, femme fatale, etc - though the ones that have names are chefs kiss wonderful. Great Aunt (the arch villain), Monique Frostique. You get it. Burns has a blast with all the superhero tropes, though I struggled to parse the plot for all its linguistic acrobatics. More than anything, it made me think back to Andrew Kaufman’s delightful All My Friends Are Superheroes. Also subversive. Also satirical. But accessible and sweet. Maybe read that first.

Mostly Hero by Anna Burns
Faber, 2026 (2014)
106 pages