A gritty, hard hitting, often depressing book.

I can see why Shuggie Bain has been nominated for so many prizes, but I found it a difficult read, in today's current climate, when a bit of hope is needed.

The relationship between Shuggie and his mother, Agnes, rings true and unfortunately, it will truely reflect the lived experiences of many children.

A worthy, informing, but difficult read.

This novel has been shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, and I will be disappointed if it does not win. What James Joyce did for Dublin, Douglas Stuart has done for 1980s (Thatcher-era) Glasgow. (I would suggest that readers look at the photos of 1980s Glasgow taken by Raymond Depardon; some are available for viewing online.)

The novel, beginning in 1981 and ending in 1992, covers Shuggie from the age of five to sixteen. A sensitive, lonely child, he endures regular physical and psychological abuse because of his effeminate mannerisms and interests. Besides bullying, he has to contend with having an absent father and an alcoholic mother.

The focus is on Shuggie’s relationship with his mother Agnes. Unhappy with her life, Agnes takes solace in alcohol. Her self-destructive journey leaves her family even more impoverished. Her two older children, Catherine and Leek, look for ways to escape so Shuggie is left to care for her. Much as he tries, Shuggie is not able to help his mother, and despite periods of sobriety, her addiction continues to spiral out of control.

This is very much a novel of character. When she was a child, Agnes’ father treated her like a princess, and she believes that her life should be so much more than it is. Though she is beautiful, her father speaks of her having a “selfish devil” inside her. In her pursuit of happiness, she leaves a stable husband and takes up with a man who promises her a more exciting life but ends up being a philanderer who has no difficulty abandoning more than one family. Angry and sad, she resorts to drinking which makes her vulnerable to predatory men. Regardless of her situation, she is a proud person: “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.” When sober, she shows herself to be full of love, but when drunk, she manipulates those she loves. In the reader, Agnes arouses complicated emotions.

Of course, Agnes’ actions have an effect on her children. Leek, for instance, walks with “hunched shoulders . . . around his ears. . . . It was getting harder to get up in the mornings, to let the day in, to come back to his body and stop floating around behind his eyelids, where he was free.” Shuggie loves his mother unconditionally and cares for her as best he can. Before he goes to school, Shuggie leaves a bucket beside her bed should Agnes vomit; he also “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 hides pills, razors, and knives so she cannot harm herself. He helps her maintain her dignity in public and tries to protect her from “uncles” who come to take advantage of her. He lives in a perpetual state of anxiety; returning home from school, he listens at the door to determine his mother’s mood. Leek tells him, “’She’s never going to get better. . . . The only thing you can save is yourself.’” Despite his brother’s warning and Agnes’ many broken promises to give up drink, Shuggie never gives up hope that his mother will get better.

The bleakness is almost unrelenting. The description of Glasgow, for instance, is depressing: “Glasgow was losing its purpose . . . Thatcher didn’t want honest workers anymore; her future was technology and nuclear power and private health. Industrial days were over, and the bones of the Clyde Shipworks and the Springburn Railworks lay about the city like rotted dinosaurs. Whole housing estates of young men who were promised the working trades of their fathers had no future now.” Agnes and her children live in a housing scheme at the edge of a shuttered colliery: “In the distance lay a sea of huge black mounds, hills that looked as if they had been burnt free of all life. . . . The burnt hills glinted when they were struck with sunlight, and the wind blew black wispy puffs from the tops like they were giant piles of unhoovered stour. Soon the greenish, brownish air filled with a dark tangy smell, metallic and sharp, like licking the end of a spent battery.”

There are touches of humour, albeit rather black humour. One woman’s child is away from home in a special school which allows her “to dedicate more time to raising her favourite child, Stella Artois.” When a friend tells Shuggie he should fight for his mother, he retorts, “’I do fight for her! . . . Mostly with herself, but it’s still a fight.’” At the end, he tells another friend, “’My mammy had a good year once. It was lovely.’”

The book includes a lot of working-class Scottish slang so readers will encounter words like dreich, girning, sleekit, boak, skelfy, papped, and gallus. A glossary would have helped because the dictionary on my Kindle didn’t have definitions for a lot of the argot.

This novel is not for the faint of heart; it is a gritty, harrowing, heart-breaking read. Its examination of the complex relationship between an alcoholic parent and a child is realistic, empathetic, and powerful. It will leave the reader drained and numb, but in awe at the author’s accomplishment, especially considering that this is a debut novel.

Note: I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.

I picked this book up on my quest to read all the books on the Booker Prize shortlist. Now that I’ve finished, I find it a little surprising that this book has been nominated for so many awards and has received such high praise. While I didn’t dislike this book, I couldn’t fully get into it either. I found it much too long and many of the characters didn’t seem fully realized to me—including the titular character, whose being gay (and tragically loving his mom as many children of alcoholics do) seemed to be his entire personality. I understand that was likely because of the way everyone around Shuggie viewed him, but I’d have liked to see him have a more well-developed personality.

I picked up this book based on the numerous awards it was nominated for and it’s easy to see what the buzz was about. It is heavy though and difficult to digest with somber topics and an overall sense of despair. Shuggie Bain doesn’t shy away from tackling the ravages of alcoholism, rape, addiction, violence, gambling excesses, hunger, prolonged unemployment, etc. There are books that are important to read because they educate us on a time, place or culture. This reminded me of Frank McCourt’s Pulitzer-winning memoir, Angela’s Ashes. McCourt’s depiction of rain-sodden, depressed 1930s Limerick, Ireland was similar to Stuart’s poverty-stricken 1980-90s Glasgow, Scotland. Shuggie Bain is fictional, however, it seems biographical at times as Stuart intimately creates such a deep connection between Shuggie and his mother. It’s heart-wrenching to see Shuggie neglected and abandoned by everyone during his coming of age journey, but Stuart expertly develops characters we feel compassion for. His gift of writing dialect, Scottish culture, and dialogue are amazing, along with his vivid description like “rain was the natural state of Glasgow. It kept the grass green and the people pale and bronchial.” It’s likely I will remember this book twenty years from now too.

I haven’t read all of the Booker shortlisted books but from the nominated books I have read, Shuggie Bain is in a different league. Set in Glasgow in the 1980s through to the 1990s, this novel is a Bildungsroman that follows protagonist Shuggie Bain’s journey from childhood into young adulthood. While Shuggie, raised in poverty and squalor battles with his homosexual identity in a homophobic era. He also has to contend with his mums spiralling alcoholism from a very young age.

This novel is confrontational and hard hitting. It doesn’t shy away from the brutal and destructive nature of alcoholism and it’s detrimental affect on close family members. This was one of the most heartbreaking and soul wrenching books I have read in years. Shuggie is a beautiful and loyal character who loves his mother Agnes and desperately and ultimately fruitlessly tries to keep his mother from the devil drink. Poignant and raw and littered with the authentic Glaswegian working class vernacular, this book is searing with the heartbreak of addiction, poverty and the complicated relationship each character battles between survival and love.

I would be over the moon for this to be the 2020 Booker winner as it is so honest and heartfelt as well as extremely haunting and painful to read. For a debut this book is incredibly impressive and I cannot wait to see what this author will write next.

Thanks to the author, the publishers Grove Press and Netgalley for a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTION:

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.

NO SPOILERS

Blimey!

I wanted to leave it at that for this review but that isn’t very professional so here we go…

No, this isn’t Angela’s Ashes, nor Paddy Clarke, nor Thomas Penman, all of which are written in the first person and all of which I love, (especially The Peculiar Memoirs of Thomas Penman). Yes, it is a tale of a tough, brutal childhood but is more contemporary than those mentioned and is written in the third person. Usually this would make everything feel a little distanced but not the way Stuart Douglas writes; he drew me in from the first page, taking me deeper with each chapter, with an intimacy seldom achieved in writing.

There were moments I wanted to abandon the book as I felt mostly anger at the majority of people in Shuggie’s life. Their aggression, intolerance, bigotry, ignorance made it impossible for me to sympathise with them and I did not want them in my head. But I did care about Shuggie; he deserved so much better.

Shuggie kept me reading and though heart-breaking at times, this book is moving and uplifting. Stuart is a skilled writer to bring these people off the page, to make me angry at some and feel pity for others.

There is beautiful prose, there is hideous description. Stuart’s style is very easy to read but it’s never “lite”. And of course, set in Glasgow, there absolutely has to be accents and while some authors do this so badly, so unintelligibly, Stuart’s dialogue is superb. To put the spoken word on paper is no easy thing and to put the dialect on paper and not staunch the flow is genius… and this is his debut novel!

As I write, Shuggie Bain has been shortlisted for The Booker Prize 2020. I have not read the other five yet so I do not know if it deserves to win, but I do know it belongs on the shortlist.


Thank you to NetGalley and Picador for the Advanced Reader Copy of the book, which I have voluntarily reviewed.

Wonderful!!!

This is my pick to win the Booker Prize 2020.

Thanks to Netgalley, the publisher and the author for sending me this ARC.

This is a difficult book to read as it is so heartbreaking. I felt such sadness for (almost) everyone in it. Several times I would be ready to begin reading but upon reflection, I would rethink that decision. I believe, primarily, with so much going on in the world these days, I was hesitant to read about people going through so much hardship. I was craving lightness, not darkness. I finally did read it but, in full disclosure, felt it necessary to put it down at times for a bit to replenish my soul. Shuggie Bain is a well-written book but perhaps now was not the best time for me to read it. I truly believe that there are certain times in our lives for certain books, maybe this was not the right time for this book for me.

At its core, Shuggie Bain is an aching, helpless love-story: the chronicle of one child’s relentless devotion to his tragic Mum, who is ravaged by alcoholism and poverty... Shuggie Bain is, as you can imagine, an intensely evocative read. It is deeply depressing, and potently conjures that sense of entrapment and helplessness which Agnes and her family suffer against. Reading its harsh and unrelenting prose, I genuinely experienced Shuggie’s constant, niggling discomfort. I felt his relentless fear, anxiety and shame. It was astounding. What struck me, too, was how deeply I felt for Agnes – someone who would ordinarily be demonised for her adversity, but who Stuart crafted with rousing, harrowing humanity. Shuggie adored her. Stuart himself very clearly adored her. And the reader can’t help but adore her, too. I’ve never felt so strongly towards a character before – never so yearned to be able to liberate somebody from their torments. Shuggie’s naive and heartfelt devotion is equally as affecting – as are the small, rare and seemingly futile acts of love offered by those around him. Stuart has captured a cast of characters that will undoubtedly haunt me for a long, long time.

Full review found here: https://brightstarbookblog.wordpress.com/2020/08/27/shuggie-bain-book-review/

Heartbreaking. From the first moments of fifteen-year-old Shuggie venturing out his tiny apartment to all the sacrifices he made as a small boy I couldn't rip my eyes from the page. The author's voice is compelling without being maudlin, honest without being overly sentimental. I cannot imagine the pain it must have caused to inhabit Shuggie's character so wholly while writing the novel.

Shuggie Bain is the single child of Shug and Agnes Bain. His mother is a proud woman, vain and always worried about what her neighbors think of her. Above all she is an alcoholic who alternates between despair and anger at the string of men who used and abandoned her all her life. Shug Bain, who she is married to at the start of the book, is a low-life taxi driver. The Bains live with Agnes' aging parents, and when Shug proclaims that he found them a council-provided place to live, Agnes dreams of a fresh start where she can finally live a life of dignity. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Shuggie is an absolute sweetheart who dotes after his mother as a young child. He initially has two elder half-siblings, the first of whom gets married and the second gets kicked out. He alone shoulders the pressure of caring for his mother, warding off the alcoholic neighbors and making sure she doesn't call the wrong people in her drunken stupor. He has problems of his own, frequently made fun of for being "strange" or "not like other boys". In other words, he's clearly gay and tries to hide it by walking with a more masculine gait and memorizing football statistics. My favorite parts of the book are when we see his personality crack through the gray backdrop of his life; when he's dancing or joking around with Agnes on her better days, we remember that he's just a child who wants to be safe and loved.

I think anyone would be able to relate deeply to this book, despite its very specific setting in Scotland. It can be very depressing at times to see how manipulative Agnes is with her children and how they can only enable her vice to keep them all alive. This is the devastating reality for many households though—it is a truth that deserves to be seen.

SHUGGIE BAIN
BY DOUGLAS STUART

SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE!

Douglas Stuart has written an epic novel in scope of the 1980's under Margaret Thatcher's regime as Great Britain's Prime Minister and the horrendous poverty, unemployment, alcoholism, drug addiction, etc...the list of impoverishment for the nation is exceedingly long. The title "SHUGGIE BAIN," could have easily been alternately called *Agnes Bain* as the story is heavily imbued with her poor choices that effect everybody in her family. She was first married to a seemingly good "Catholic" man who she has her first two young children with named Catherine and Leek. Agnes grows restless with Brendan (her first husband), even though he brings home good wages every week for their family financial security. This proves to be too stable and unexciting for her and she leaves him taking their two young children to run off with philandering taxi cab driver named Shug Bain. With nowhere to live they move in with her parents Lizzie and Wullie in their sixteen story tower flat.

Agnes's first husband Brendan swallows his pride and asks Agnes to come back to him contorting himself into being anything Agnes would like him to change about himself and she is resolute in saying no. She divorces him to be with Shug Bain and her and Shug have her youngest child called Hugh Bain but he goes by the name of Shuggie Bain. There is much turmoil caused by Agnes's foul mouth at Shug's constant cheating and not coming home after driving his shift on the taxi cab and against Catherine, Leek, Lizzie and Wullie's wishes, Shug and Agnes move out. However, this move is into the slums called "the pit," an out of work coal mine region where the housing is bleak and there is soot everywhere. If that's not bad enough Shug never moves in with them he just abandons them after he drops them off. At this point Agnes starts drinking more heavily into becoming a full blown alcoholic. Catherine and Leek are already moving on leaving poor Shuggie to take care of himself and Agnes. Shuggie has to endure a revolving door of unknown men coming and going and Agnes spending all of her subsidized payments on alcohol often times with little or no food in the house.

This was a bleak, depressing time for Shuggie trying to navigate life alone getting bullied at school and from the neighborhood kids. Shuggie is sweet and lovable and embodies everything pure in a boy his age. This gave the novel redemption and a respite from Agnes's spiraling deeper into darkness as she devolves deeper into alcoholism and neglect of Shuggie during her binges. An overall powerful story that is at times gut wrenching and also glimmers with rays of hope. This novel sparkles in its realism and its portrayal of the underbelly of the many aforementioned themes that poverty and addiction can reek havoc not only on society at large but also illuminates its devastating effects on an individual family. Shuggie Bain's character is a diamond in the rough!

Publication Date: February 11, 2020

Available in bookstores now!

Thank you to Net Galley, Douglas Stuart and Grove Atlantic for generously providing me with my ARC in exchange for a fair and honest review. All opinions are my own.

#ShuggieBain #DouglasStuart #GroveAtlantic #NetGalley

The title of this book should have been “Agnes Bain, as it is primarily about the self-destructive journey of a woman in her mid forties whose addiction to alcohol ruins the lives of her three children, particularly the youngest, a sensitive boy named Hugh after his brutish father.
Set in the Glasgow of the eighties in an impoverished neighborhood, the bleak situation of this family unravels painfully slow, at a deliberate lagging pace, in episodes of Agnes’ failed attempts at sobriety and the inevitable relapses that follow along with the devastating effects they have on her children and their doomed futures.

This is also a love-hate story between a tormented mother and a sensitive boy that somehow reminded me of <i>“On earth we’re briefly gorgeous”</i>. Almost opposite in style but equally intense in delivery, Stuart uses the first-person narrator reproducing the Glasgow patter to make the reader participant of the little tragedies that befall on this family and the castigated community they live in where gender violence, addiction and abuse abound on a daily basis.

Even though I thought the novel dragged a bit in some parts, I was utterly moved by the portrayal of the relationship between Agnes and Shuggie. Stuart narrates from the heart, maybe even from experience, and the unconditional love the boy showers her mother with feels excruciatingly real, and sad, and unfair, but also extremely beautiful for its purity and innocence. To be able to evoke such feelings amidst the greyish setting of this novel is nothing short of a great achievement.
Blessings seldom come in a world like Shuggie’s, but this reader felt blessed by his indefatigable hope and silent courage, and that is what I take away with me; Shuggie’s authenticity and his blind belief in the goodness of people.
The title might be fitting after all…

Wonderfully heartbreaking as well as heartbreakingly wonderful. Douglas Stuart treats what would seem to be grim subject matter-- a bullied gay schoolboy growing up in 1980s post-industrial Glasgow with an alcoholic mother and absent father-- with great delicacy and humanity, Most of the novel takes place in a depressed community on the outskirts of town surrounding a closed coal mine, where the left-behind survivors of Thatcherite policies, most of them Irish Catholics, turn to drink in the absence of jobs or hope. The character of Agnes, Shuggie's mother, is simultaneously tragically flawed yet magnetically alluring to Shuggie, as he navigates being a despised outcast in a world of unreconstructed patriarchy. This would sound like a truly exhausting read, but it is anything but. Most of all, Stuart leavens the darkness, brutality, and abuse with sparkles of joy and wit. And high comedy, if you like yours served pitch-dark with a thick Glaswegian accent.

Thanks to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for providing an advance copy of this in exchange for an unbiased review.

It’s a charming book, if uneven. Well-drawn characters and some really immersive scenes of 80s Glasgow and its many inimitable characters.

It feels like a debut, like it was written over the course of years and sewn together. Sometimes you forget that just long enough for a new section to feel jarring. It also suffers a little from too many scenes that tell the reader the same thing. Some flashbacks were also a bit out of place. Goes a bit hard on the grime at points; it’s much more successful when focusing on private moments and personal struggles. The focus on alcoholism is its strong suit, along with its sense of people, their relationships, and some beautiful tender moments.

If it weren’t a personal story it definitely could’ve been a little slimmer, but it’s hard to get away from the feeling that much of it is autobiographical.

Still, a strong voice and overall a touching story.

A beautiful novel of the love between a mother and a son. Loved the 1980s Glaswegian setting. The characters and environment jump off the page. I recently interviewed Douglas for my podcast This Book Could Change Your Life. Take a listen using the link below.

Since books set in Scotland always appeal, this one did not disappoint. A moving and timely story good for many readers.

My goodness this book was such a sorrowful, heart wrenching, powerful read. It was told from many points of view but Shuggie Bain was the main character. He was the youngest son of Agnes and Shuggie. He was forgotten really and his purpose in life became caring for his alcoholic, self-destructive mother. This book was regularly written in the Glasgow dialect which took a little while to get used to but added considerably to the reading of the book. Thatcher’s Glasgow reminded me of Frank McCourt’s Limerick, dull, dreary, hungry and impoverished, not for indeed, but certainly for the down trodden and those who were slaves to the demon drink. My heart went out to poor, sensitive, different Shuggie throughout this memoir. I thought this was very well written. It will stay with me for a long time to come. It is hard to believe this is Douglas Stuart’s debut novel. I can’t wait to read more from this talented. He really is so on point, so gritty and honest, he doesn’t hold back. He will go far.

Although I have had an ARC of this for quite a few months, it took this making the Booker longlist for me to actually get around to reading it, but I am so glad I finally did. Although I have only read 4 of the 13 of this year's Booker nominees, so far, it is going to take a lot for something to knock this off the top of my rankings. It is a really special book, astonishing in the depth of feeling, characterization, and sheer storytelling brio; one can tell how carefully crafted each and every sentence is (apparently it took the author over a decade to complete this debut and surely autobiographical novel) - and although the subject matter is rather bleak and depressing, the ultimate feeling this left me with was uplifting and exhilarating. The character of Agnes is sui generis, but each of the characters is delineated with sharp insight and the telling detail. My one minor quibble is that there is a LOT of Scottish slang ('gallus' is a great new word for me!), and perhaps a glossary for the more outré of these would have been helpful.

Often I find it easier to review something I disliked at greater length, and I really have little more to say about this, other than I enjoyed every moment of it, and hope it doesn't take Stuart another decade for a follow-up. Finally, this is a really interesting interview with the author - love just listening to his accent, but it also provides a glimpse into his process and what he wanted to do with the novel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwCd2.... What a lovely and charming man.

Many, MANY thanks to Grove Atlantic and Netgalley for the ARC in exchange for this honest and enthusiastic review!

Agnes Bain. She is on the road to destruction. Beautiful and charismatic, albeit lost, as everyone seems to be leaving her. Her second husband, Shug, is a womanizer and has left her for the next best thing. Alcoholism is her vice, to the point where she forgets to feed her three children, but making herself look prim and proper is one thing she never gave up. In the midst of her drug-filled stupor and poverty, Stuart has spun a woe-begone tale of 7-year-old Shuggie Bain, battling to keep his mother alive and making ends meet.

This book shattered me and hit close to home. Alcoholism is a battle fought by innumerable people, and this book showcased how kids and loved ones live in fear, wondering where their next meal will come from and when a tantrum or withdrawal will begin.

When Agnes decided to go cold turkey, Shuggie would wait with bated breath, praying every minute that his mother would not crave for a drop of oblivion. He would try to keep her happy and occupied. That is a huge burden for a 7-year-old to shoulder, but bear it he did.

The writing was smooth and concise, flowing into the lives of Agnes and Shuggie. The words went through me like a whirlwind bringing forth emotions which were hard to control. I felt so happy when Agnes decided to give up alcohol, and each time an opportunity sprang up, I kept rooting for her not to give in.

When Shuggie carried all the blades, knives and medicines to school, hoping she would not take any drastic steps, my heart melted. The strange aunties and uncles who came to visit his mother bewildered him, and he tried to overcome each hurdle.

One scene which has imprinted on my heart - the picture of Shuggie having kept a glass of water, a loaf of bread, a bucket in case his mother wanted to throw up, and a glass of beer to get over the withdrawal, in front of her before he left for school. He wanted to be there for her even when he couldn't.

This book...I will likely still be processing it for awhile. It's like a punch to the gut: brutal, painful, heartbreaking, unforgettable. The tale of Shuggie Bain is full of broken promises, physical abuse, and cruel characters in the rough slums of Glasgow and yet there is love at the heart of it. The rich dialect and Glaswegian slang is almost a character in itself. The dialogue has a distinct cadence and reads like lyrics to an old song. The characters are rich, hateable, pitiable, harrowing and haunting. Shuggie refuses to give up on his mother and the novel reminds us that those we love and are closest to us are sometimes the hardest to save. I haven't heard enough people talk about this book and it will be one I am going to recommend to anyone I meet. This is the best book I have read in 2020 and I can't wait to read what Douglas Stuart writes next.