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

Lea Hi

"Do ye know what to do, if ye really want to get yer own back?" He paused. So like a man, she thought, to have an opinion on everything. "What?" "It's quite easy. Ye should just get the fuck on with it." He slapped his hands and threw them open in a wide tah-dah gesture. "Get on wi' yer fuckin' life. Have a great life. Ah promise that nothing would piss the pig-faced baldy bastard off more. Guar-rant-teed."

She had loved him, and he had needed to break her completely to leave her for good. Agnes Bain was too rare a thing to let someone else love. It wouldn't do to leave pieces of her for another man to collect and repair later.

He danced for her, stepping side to side and clicking his fingers and missing every beat. When she laughed, he danced harder. He did whatever had caused her to laugh another dozen times till her smile stretched thin and false, and then he searched for the next move that would make her happy. He bounced and flung his arms out as she laughed and clapped. The happier she looked, the harder he wanted to spin and flail. The vibrating patterned wallpaper threatened to make him sick, but he kept going, punching the air and rattling his hips. Agnes threw her head back in peals of laughter, and the sadness was gone from her eyes. Shuggie snapped his fingers like a hardman and jutted his head, still missing the beat. It didn't matter.

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

sina (she/her) 

"You don't have to, if you don't want to," said Eugene softly. "Ah'm no forcing ye."

It was true that the ring of green around Gasgow held the new slums of the urban resettlement, these forgotten, remote housing schemes. It seemed cruel to Agnes that these green fields also held some of the fanciest hotels and private clubs she had ever seen. The two different worlds didn't like to look on each other.

"What do you drink when you dinnae drink alcohol?" He looked truly perplexed. It was a general question, not meant just for her. But Agnes took it the other way. "Mostly the tears of my enemies, and when I can't get that, tea or tap water."

No day ever started well with six dozen raw chickens, and today of all days, it was stealing the sweetness out of his daydreams.

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

Sarah Christine Gill

With two quick turns of her wrist the woman snapped a cardboard box together. The red tarts looked like four ruby hearts. He paid the woman, pulled up his hood, and went back into the dreich. The money did the thing it always did: now that the fiver was broken, he found himself in a small shop, spending some shrapnel on a large bottle of fizzy ginger. With the tinned fish in his bag and the ruby hearts he walked the length of the long street. He wandered through the old part of Merchant City until he had covered the Trongate and the Saltmarket and found himself back at the wide river. He walked along the empty riverbank until he came to the mouth of Shipbank Lane. Under the overhang of the old Saint Enoch railway, groups of men huddled in T-shirt sleeves and thin suit jackets. They shivered and jangled as they hawked pirated videocassettes off flattened cardboard boxes. Women ignored them as they came down the narrow alley carrying bags filled with second-hand clothes they had bought from the market at the top.

The night before they moved she burst the television meter one last time and bought handfuls of chocolate at the ice cream van. She laid all her old clothes out for Shuggie, and they sat with their knees touching, deciding what versions of her to bring and what to leave behind.

“I was going to go out and get you a new daddy.” 

He ran the thick brush around the side of her hair, and the hairspray cracked and dusted the air like sweet pollen. He liked the way the hair started to soften and feather. 

“That’s OK. I don’t need a daddy.”

She was no use at maths homework, and some days you could starve rather than get a hot meal from her, but Shuggie looked at her now and understood this was where she excelled. Everyday with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world. When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise.

After the burial, Agnes wrapped sandwiches in paper towels and sent Shuggie three times around the room, until black handbags were bursting and fragrant with hot salmon and butter. Even when people turned the boy away Agnes sent him back around, and around, with pretty plates heavy with thick meat.

As Wullie knelt, Lizzie had been touching him gently, almost not touching him. The back of his neck was a syrupy brown like she had never seen, it was the colour of burnt sugar tablet, golden and sweet. She could see a little down the back of his shirt neck, and she could see how the line changed sharply from this dark burnt tan to a healthy golden tone. She had been gently considering a lock of hair that curled behind his ear; it was free of pomade and a horn-brown colour so alive with the sun, so different from tip to root, that she didn’t recognize it, she didn’t recognize him. She wondered, where had the flat ebony gone that she knew and loved. She let the fine hair run through her fingers, and then she tugged it, hard.

Lizzie’s brow furrowed as she ran her fingers over the cabinet shelves. There was nothing there to eat: a handful of pockmarked potatoes, a stick of gritty lard, and a poke of flour that was so used up it looked like it might blow over from emptiness. She reached behind the empty bread bin, took an old box of soap flakes off the bottom shelf, and tipped it gently. Three hidden eggs rolled out of the box. They were brown and plump, with not a speckle on them. With a spoonful of lard she cracked them into the black pan, and they rolled and spat luxuriously in the bubbling fat. She turned to Agnes and put her finger across her lips in a secretive way. The bairn looked up at her with fat cheeks, and she put her little pink finger across her bud of a mouth and made the motion back to her mammy. Agnes sat on Lizzie’s knee, and they ate the hidden eggs from the same plate. The yolk was so deep and fatty that Lizzie could feel it coat her teeth, and she could see...

In the bedroom she changed her skirt for something that would let her kick, and donned the angora jumper with the rhinestone beads, the impractically fluffy one that Colleen had been so suspicious of. She took some time going through her box of jewels, picking the largest gemmed rings, which were papal in scale. The glass gems were so poorly set they ripped tights and caught on tea towels. Some mornings after a bad bender, she woke up to find cuts on the side of her face or the inside of her forearms. Agnes looked at her bejewelled hands, a sparkling weaponry, knuckledusters of peeling, plated gold. The last of the lager curdled in her empty stomach, and she knew the time was now.

Joe took the white paper and dropped a heaped scoop of fat chips and a big bit of golden battered fish on it. He drizzled the hot food with salt and vinegar, and Shug circled with his fingers. “Mair, Joe. Mair.” The man piled it on till it was sodden.

He liked the drive from Sighthill, it was like a descent into the heart of the Victorian darkness. The closer you got to the river, the lowest part of the city, the more the real Glasgow opened up to you. There were hidden nightclubs tucked under shadowy railway arches, and blacked-out windowless pubs where old men and women sat on sunny days in a sweaty, pungent purgatory.

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.

Michaela Hudson

Copy provided by publisher

Update: Had to give it a 5 bc I'm still haunted

I love how well the characters (mostly Shuggie, Agnes but Eugene and Leek are among the honorable mentions) and their struggles were portrayed in the book. However, please be cautious bc there's a shitton of trigger warnings and some scenes were really disturbing to read. The writing screamed Scottish, which I found myself fumbling with the slangs at first, but as the story went on, having adapted to the words, it became truly fascinating. 

Still, I'd rather the author chose a different ending and gave more insights of Thatcher's scheme. Worthy winner, and worth reading (if you are brave enough)

Shalini Basu

What a lovely reminder that we suffer and watch our loved ones suffer and in midst of all the tragedy, life still goes on.

Geetika 

More than anything, this single track of storyline added all flavours of human emotions and suffering. It is a story about a son who is immensely optimistic as well as pragmatic about the life of his family (dysfunctional or not). Shuggie and his mum's relationship over the years while the latter slips under and above alcoholism and how this forces a 9-year-old to come of age too soon. 
It's a slow burn and a slow candy.

Lol did I really read this over 2 months? It's me, not you douglas

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.

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 ☁️

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 ❤️

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."

Publicado com links em :
https://virtual-illusion.blogspot.com...

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.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2020

Marloes

A deserved Booker Prize this time. Shuggie, a 'wee' boy, growing up with his drunk mother in 1980's Glasgow. She slowly and painfully disintegrates from society while he is finding himself. The story is intimate, honest and gripping. Aye, it wrecked my heart. And love the Scottish!

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.

Nadine 

Couldn't finish - altogether too depressing for me at the moment.

Jan Jackson

Ooft. This one was something else. The grim reality of lives lost to capitalism and the wholesale destruction of individuals, families, and communities, as seen through the eyes of a growing boy and his alcoholic mother. 

Sad, savage, and grim. But beautifully realised. Every word is well placed, and the conjuring and evocation of those forgotten in the balancing of profit and loss puts this in my Best Book Of 2021 slot. Pretty sure I won’t be reading anything else better this year.

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, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist with a powerful and important story to tell.

Jessica Bateson

I made it to the end and enjoyed it, it is written in very beautiful / harrowing detail, but it is pretty long-winded and repetitive 

Celeste Sunderland Gottfried

This wasn't the lighthearted Christmas-time read I would have preferred for this time of year, but nevertheless it offered an important glimpse into life in 1970s/1980s Glasgow during the Thatcher years. Many heavy topics from on the author's own childhood (from what I understand) are explored, perhaps most importantly, a child's devotion to his mother.

Shuggie Bain A Novel

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