Shuggie Bain
by Douglas Stuart
Summary
Glasgow in the 1980s, with the pits and the yards closing and Thatcher's government showing no particular interest. Agnes Bain is glamorous, proud, funny and drinking herself to death. Her youngest son Shuggie is the one who stays, cleaning her up, hiding the cans, believing every time that this time she will stop.
The novel follows them across roughly a decade, through a scheme on the edge of the city, a taxi driver husband who leaves, and a slow retreat by everyone else in the family until only the boy is left. Shuggie is also, unmistakably to everyone but himself at first, gay, in a place and a decade with no vocabulary for it that is not an insult.
Stuart wrote it over ten years and it is closely based on his own childhood. His mother died of alcoholism when he was sixteen and the book is dedicated to her, which you can feel on every page: there is no distance in it and no attempt at one.
It is long, unrelenting and very hard in places. It is also extremely funny, because Agnes is, and because Glaswegian speech is, and the comedy is what makes the rest survivable. What lifts it above misery is that Stuart never asks you to pity anyone. He asks you to see why the boy keeps trying, and he makes Agnes so vivid that you understand exactly why leaving her is unthinkable.
Go in prepared. Addiction, poverty, sexual violence and homophobia are all here and none of it is softened. It is worth every difficult page.
Historical Context & Significance
Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize in 2020, a debut novel that had been turned down by dozens of publishers before it found one.
Margaret Busby, chairing the judges, said it was destined to be a classic and called it a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a closely bound social world, its people and its values. The panel's vote was quick and unanimous, which is unusual enough to be worth recording.
Stuart was forty four and working as a fashion designer in New York when it won, having spent a decade writing it around a full time job. The prize transformed the book's fortunes: it went from a modest print run to an international bestseller within weeks, and a television adaptation was announced. His second novel, Young Mungo, covers adjacent ground in the same city.