Name: Shuggie Bain
Rating: 4.293367346938775 (196 reviews)
ISBN: 9780802148049

Douglas Stuart

The story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in public housing in Glasgow, Scotland

A Novel

Shuggie Bain

Winner of the Booker Prize 2020 Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction 2020 The Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2020 'Douglas Stuart has written a first novel of rare and lasting beauty.' – Observer It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. Shuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother’s sense of snobbish propriety. The miners' children pick on him and adults condemn him as no’ right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place. Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride. A counterpart to the privileged Thatcher-era London of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, it also recalls the work of Édouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, a blistering debut by a brilliant writer with a powerful and important story to tell. 'We were bowled over by this first novel, which creates an amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love.' – The judges of the Booker Prize

Winner of the Booker Prize 2020

Boy, this was depressing, heart-wrenching, stressful, and genuinely dreadful to read. I don't think I've ever felt this emotionally exhausted while reading a book. I was almost in tears imagining little Shuggie trying to look after his mother and dealing with things that no child should ever have to experience.

That taxi scene, when he doesn't even have enough money to pay the driver and ends up offering something else instead, was particularly difficult to read. It broke something in me. It's heartbreaking to witness someone slowly losing themselves to addiction, and even more painful to see the people who love them suffer alongside them.

What makes this story so difficult is that you can feel Shuggie's helplessness. He's just a child who wants to love his mother, take care of her, and somehow make things right, even when there is so little he can actually do.

Overall, a beautifully written but devastating novel. I'm glad I read it, but I wouldn't recommend it to someone who isn't prepared to handle some really heavy and heartbreaking themes. Still, I'd say give it a try at least once.

Ashish Singh

Boy, this was depressing, heart-wrenching, stressful, and genuinely dreadful to read. I don't think I've ever felt this emotionally exhausted while reading a book. I was almost in tears imagining little Shuggie trying to look after his mother and dealing with things that no child should ever have to experience.

That taxi scene, when he doesn't even have enough money to pay the driver and ends up offering something else instead, was particularly difficult to read. It broke something in me. It's heartbreaking to witness someone slowly losing themselves to addiction, and even more painful to see the people who love them suffer alongside them.

What makes this story so difficult is that you can feel Shuggie's helplessness. He's just a child who wants to love his mother, take care of her, and somehow make things right, even when there is so little he can actually do.

Overall, a beautifully written but devastating novel. I'm glad I read it, but I wouldn't recommend it to someone who isn't prepared to handle some really heavy and heartbreaking themes. Still, I'd say give it a try at least once.

Ryan Mateyk

I absolutely loved sweet Shuggie Bain. Heartbreaking, heartwarming, tender, emotional, perfect!

armoni mayes

I was not sure what to expect when I started this book, all I had heard was it was being compared to A Little Life. This made me nervous because I don't want to read a book about someone being traumatized brutally for absolutely no reason. But I was pleasantly surprised by the way that Stuart is able to convey disturbing events without having to go into excruciating detail (essentially leaving it up to the reader's imagination). If I am remembering correctly, there is only one scene where a SA occurs that goes into minor details, but overall is not too horrible. 

The entire novel I just wanted to give Shuggie a hug and tell him everything was going to be okay because Shuggie deserves WAY better than his parents, Agnes and Shug. This novel deals with addiction, alcoholism, absentee parenting, violence against women, and parent-child dynamics. If you have ever had a parent or someone close to you deal with alcoholism or even just alcohol problems, this book may hit a little too close to home. 

This novel perfectly encapsulates how being a child and having a parent struggling with addiction (in this case it's the alcohol of course). How helpless you feel, how much you wish you could take their problems away, and wish that your love would be enough for them to stop. 

 Quotes from Shuggie Bain that made me feel something: 

 Shuggie put the phone back on the cradle and stood in the hallway, waiting for her to say something, anything. Agnes could have said anything then, and he would have taken it and he would have forgiven her. He would have sat back at her side and wrapped his arms around her legs. He could starve, as long as they starved together. 

 Shuggie arranged three tea mugs: one with tap water to dry the cracks in her throat, one with milk to line her sour stomach, and the third with a mixture of the flat leftovers of Special Brew and stout that he had gathered from around the house and frothed together with a fork. He knew this was the one she would reach for first, the one that would stop the crying in her bones. 

 Still, Leek thought this new sadness was better than the anger he had felt at first. Sadness made for a better houseguest; at least it was quiet, reliable, consistent.

Luke Harkness

When I first started Shuggie Bain, I didn't get it. But around 200 pages in, I became obsessed. This is one of those tales that I often struggle to get into as I'm not sure where it's going or what the point of it is. Then one event happens or it suddenly clicks inside me that I'm not supposed to be waiting for a rising plot, I'm supposed to be encompassing all of the mini-plots unraveling within the story and squishing them together into one amazing tale. This is Shuggie Bain. Shuggie Bain is also pain, sorrow, sadness and brutal honesty. It's a must-read but features a fair few trigger warnings.

Gavin

A good misery memoir but no more. It is sodden with desperation and with rape. There's a lot of those in the world. But there's more of other things.

It’s apparently pretty autobiographical. if Stuart’s lived experience is such and such, who am I to contradict it? Well it's not his experience I take issue with, it's the depiction of the whole city as a depraved concrete jungle. This is about the only place I get to pull an identity card: I’ve lived in the rougher part of the roughest place in Scotland (Paisley). Jakeys shooting up in the hall, rats, rain, far-right billboards. But a book would be basically false if it included only these and not hundreds of hours in a beautiful free library, helpless laughter with your idiot mate, delight in basic things and discounts. Ferguslie 2013 wasn’t as rough as Sighthill 1981, and 14 isn’t 23, but it’s not a million miles. 

  “The men standing around her were only boys, younger than her and probably younger than Leek. They had been smoking and waiting in the dark. With no peace at home they were waiting for someone to molest or for a chance to knife the night watchman”


  “Rain was the natural state of Glasgow. It kept the grass green and the people pale and bronchial. Its effect on the taxi business was negligible. It was a problem because it was mostly inescapable and the constant dampness was pervasive, so fares might as well sit damp on a bus as damp in the back of an expensive taxi. On the other hand, rain meant that the young lassies from the dancing all wanted to take a taxi home so as not to ruin their stiff hair or their sharp shoes”


Anyway it is silly of me to be cross at fiction for not being nonfiction, except that fiction informs you people, and misery memoirs mostly inform you wrong. Here's a line where Stuart admits it:

  The city was alive below him, and he had never seen a half of it.


  Now and then fresh air pulled in and out of the sixteenth-floor window, and the women blinked at the sharpness of it. Lizzie drank her cold black tea and watched as the women all descended towards the darkness in their moods. Fresh air always did this to the drunk. The light, gossipy energy was leaving the room and being replaced by something stickier and thicker


The logic is fully established by the end of chapter 6 and I would stop there if I had known this. Actually that 80 page novella is a better book I think. Agnes' only real mistake is to seek passion and excitement in place of dour duty. Her punishment for this is extreme but not unrealistic, given the amplifiers around her, booze and poverty. 

  “the way it tasted like fizzy ginger, milk, and porridge all at the same time”


  “You cheeky streak of piss.” Her false teeth ground together in her tight face. Only her eyes were loose and half-detached, rolling under the waves of the day’s drink.”

Glasgow had problems on top of the normal Scottish ones:

  “Aw, ye missed a great game, a bloody great game.” The man was tutting to himself. “Who do ye support then?”
“Celtic,” he lied. He was no Catholic, but it was the shortcut to ending the conversation.
The auld man’s face crumpled like a dropped towel. “Oh, fur fuck’s sake, might’ve known ah’d get in a Pape’s taxi.”

I never heard any of this shite in my whole childhood, except from visiting Glaswegians.

Is there a single male character in this who isn’t predatory, apart from Shug? Yes: Mr Cameron, Catherine’s middle-class boss. (The book is oddly fair to Big Shug, not just a 2D swaggering abuser, whose monologue chapter comes straight after the shocking violence of Blackpool, but which is poetic and only normally predatory.) 

  “Ah. I’ll let you touch my willy.”
The driver looked at the boy in the mirror for a while. His eyes sat deep and small in his pink face. They were hard to read. His lips barely moved beneath his moustache. “Son, how old are you?”
“Fourteen.”
The man didn’t take his eyes from the boy’s face. His head seemed to roll back on to his thick neck, and his moustache danced unhappily”


Agnes' father is ultimately revealed as a fool who gives in and reinforces predation. Leek looks predatory and makes camp with predators but isn't. Half of the women too.

I wonder how many fourteen year olds there are now, parenting their parents? Luckily fewer than then.

  Shuggie nodded, slowly and obediently. He had touched it [their mother] last. He could never be free. 


  “would have sat back at her side and wrapped his arms around her legs. He could starve, as long as they starved together”

This book shows the unconditional and heartbreaking love from a child to it's broken mother and the influence of addicted parents on their children. The story is written beautiful and won't let you go.

Lea Hi

wow, the kind of book that you read and it has you in your mind for days/ weeks after. this story will stay with me for a long time, heartbreaking and raw. 

jaz ☁️

A stunning debut novel by a masterful writer telling the heartwrenching story of a young boy and his alcoholic mother, whose love is only matched by her pride

It is a heartbreaking and honest story, so many layers - mother/son relationship, family tensions, (alcohol) addiction and the societal norm to drink, the pressure on women, the pressure on boys to be 'real men', poverty, industrial changes, being unable to explore your own sexuality as its considered 'outside the norm', how men, more often than not, take whatever they want because they suck. Added charm (and challenge): at times, the dialogue is in Scots ❤️

sina (she/her) 

Megan Snodgrass

3.5/5

I might just be emotionally dead inside after reading A Little Life, but I wasn't as in love with this as I thought I'd be. Maybe because it gave me Angela's Ashes vibes which is one of my favorite books of all time, which isn't necessarily a fair comparison but what are you gonna do.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it, one week on. Beautiful. ❤️

Laura Gill

Hellboy TCR

A stunning debut novel. There are so many powerful, heartbreaking moments in this book. Will write in detail, later.

Nelson Zagalo

Demorou 10 anos a escrever, e isso é mais do que evidente no labor da escrita, não apenas na sua beleza mas no intrincado detalhe com que vai descrevendo cena atrás de cena, representando não apenas o espaço e a ação, mas dando conta do sentir dos vários pontos de vista dos seus personagens. Existe uma sensação de completude, como se cada cena fosse um exercício estudado por Douglas Stuart, trabalhado como se de pequenas jóias se tratassem. Mas não é mera expressão o que aqui temos, nem poderia ser. Ninguém conseguiria chegar a tanto detalhe se não tivesse realmente vivido muito do que ali se conta. Por isso quando pegamos na história de vida de Douglas Stuart e percebemos o decalque, não é apenas o horror do que nos foi contado que nos toca, o tremor acontece ao perceber que foi possível atravessar tudo aquilo e mesmo assim chegar ao topo do mundo da escrita, acrescentando ainda que levou mais 12 anos a publicar, tendo sido recusado 44 vezes pelas editoras. Se o livro termina como uma dor brutal, o reconhecimento da carreira do seu autor oferece-nos a admiração plena e uma esperança de esplendor máximo.

"1981, Glasgow. A outrora próspera cidade mineira sufoca sob o jugo férreo das políticas de Margaret Thatcher, lançando milhares de famílias para a miséria. A epidemia do álcool e das drogas aproveita para capturar os mais vulneráveis."

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Eva Bailey

4.5 stars. Devastating but so beautifully written. I couldn't put it down but also found some parts so hard to read.

A heart-wrenchingly moving first novel set in Glasgow during the Thatcher years, Shuggie Bain tells the story of a boy's doomed attempt to save his proud, alcoholic mother from her addiction.

Cams Campbell

My eyes are a little moist. What a novel. It captures Glasgow as a character perfectly.

WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher’s policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city’s notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie’s mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie’s guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good—her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamorous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion’s share of each week’s benefits—all the family has to live on—on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs. Agnes’s older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Shuggie is meanwhile struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is “no right,” a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her—even her beloved Shuggie. A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. Recalling the work of Édouard Louis, Alan Hollinghurst, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist who has a powerful and important story to tell.

A Novel (Booker Prize Winner)

Fraser Simons

I think if this had been a bit more tight it might have been a 5 star book for me. I’ve seen it compared to A Little Life, and I can understand that comparison somewhat, but only so far as tone and quality of prose. 

Where A Little Life stresses and frays emotions to give them a heightened quality, this book usually tends to be less specific, making it more hyper realistic in its depiction of poverty, alcoholism, and patriarchy. 

Shrugged Bain excels at making each plot beat feel like a recalled biography moment and it relentless dogged the coming-of-age of a young sweet boy with moments that would surely cripple most people. 

The structure of the book works pretty well, but does feel a bit weird sometimes. Meandering rather than purposeful, and has a strange relationship with time. It bugged me at first but as I got more into it I didn’t mind. 

I’m not sure there’s anything you’d be surprised about once you are clued into time and place and troubles of the city and characters, but it’s well done for what it is.

Josh Clement

I liked the Scottish vernacular and dialogue. I liked all the characters. Some very sad and cruel moments but also some hopeful moments too.

Jeff Brown 

This is a difficult book to rate. It is dark. It is uncomfortable. I found it difficult to continue reading.

But you can't stop reading.

There is every kind of emotional feeling throughout this book -- trauma, loneliness, love, loss, abandonment, addiction, a role-reversal of the mother-son dynamic, being different, heartless taunting. If any of these are triggers, or if you are in a sad place yourself, this isn't the book for you.

Shuggie is the title character, and while he is a constant throughout, he doesn't become the central figure until the last quarter or so of the book. His mother, Agnes, is the central figure throughout most of the book, and her story is tragic. 

Tragic in today's sense in America, but common in 1980's Scotland, where Margaret Thatcher's policies destroyed the country during this period.

A NYT review said, "(The author) shows us lots of monstrous behavior, but not a single monster -- only the damage."

It is a book of fiction, but it seems too real. That was verified in the opening line of the author's acknowledgements: "I owe everything to my mother and her struggles, and to my brother who gave me everything he could."

Great writing, horrible story. It will be interesting to see if he can duplicate this success.

Shuggie Bain A Novel

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