An uncompromising yet tender and warmly witty exploration of love, pride and poverty, Shuggie Bain charts the endeavours of its eponymous protagonist – an ambitious and fastidious boy from a dire mining town with a thirst for a better life.
Exclusive Edition which contains an extra essay written by Douglas Stuart.
A standard edition is available here.
Winner of the Booker Prize 2020
Shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize 2021
Longlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2021
Longlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction 2021
Winner of Scottish Waterstones Book of the Year 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 Edouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, a blistering debut by a brilliant writer with a powerful and important story to tell.
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 2928377053727
Number of pages: 400
Dimensions: 197 x 130 mm
Wonderful read. Fantastic debut. I knew I would love this book from the title and cover photograph. It was as good as I thought it might be. Sad but not depressing it was ultimately uplifting.
I was lucky enough...
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Agnes had so many hopes for her life. Her first husband was simply a disappointment, too well-behaved, too boring. With Shug Bain things could be different. But soon she wakes up still in her childhood room with her... More
The story starts with a teenage Shuggie holed up in a boarding house trying to make ends meet with a job on the deli counter in a supermarket whilst trying to attend school. It then flits back to start the story from... More
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