Douglas Stuart
Shuggie Bain
“A debut novel that reads like a masterpiece, Shuggie Bain gives voice to the kind of helpless, hopeless love that children can feel toward broken parents.”
Pan Macmillan, 2020
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.
WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2020
LONGLISTED FOR ABIA INTERNATIONAL BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021
Douglas Stuart was born and raised in Glasgow. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in London, he moved to New York City, where he began a career in fashion design. Shuggie Bain is his first novel. Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize for its unsparing yet tender portrayal of an alcoholic mother and her son in Thatcher-era Glasgow. Informed by Stuart's own childhood and likened to the writing of Hanya Yanagihara A Little Life, the novel is an exploration of queerness, abuse and poverty, buoyed by the unsinkable love of young Shuggie for his ailing mum.
