Little Constructions by Man Booker Prize-winner Anna Burns tells the frenetic story of a family on the brink of annihilation. Jetty Doe enters a gun shop one day, blindly determined to buy a weapon with which to seek revenge. From there, an enigmatic, first-person narrator takes readers on speeding taxi rides, through abuse-strewn homes, and across generations as the Doe family sows a legacy of violence, betrayal and hatred. The female members of the Doe clan rage and combust around their brutal patriarch, John Doe, while onlookers struggle, often futilely, to steer clear of their destructive, gravitational pull.
As in her novels Milkman and No Bones, Burns displays her lyrical skill with complex and affecting prose. Every sentence is a knot of emotional heft that Burns progressively tightens, only to unwind and start again. The narrator of Little Constructions, in particular, tells this catastrophic story in a wonderfully distinctive voice that is as colloquial as it is opaque. Despite the brilliantly complex network of characters and relationships Burns's narrator spins, the story's central tragedy and themes remain clear and always in focus. In fact, it is the very chaos and insatiability of the novel's structure that illustrate the impossibility and futility of assigning singular blame or seeking perfect justice in a world built upon such interwoven networks of causation. Like the rhythm of Burns's prose, which follows each labyrinthine, intricate sentence with a simple bullet, Burns is able, at a key moment in the text, to condense the entirety of her elaborate assemblage into one image: "Beautiful women, with blood on their hands." --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor