Shuggie Bain: Winner of the Booker Prize 2020

About this book

Winner of the Booker Prize 2020 Winner of Book of the Year at the British Book Awards 2021 Winner of Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards 2021 Shortlisted for the US National Book Award for Fiction 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 mothers 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 Stuarts 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 Hollinghursts The Line of Beauty it also recalls the work of douard 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