Shuggie Bain

Douglas Stuart’s blistering and heartbreaking debut is an exploration of the unsinkable love that only children can have for their damaged parents. Set in working-class Glasgow in the febrile 1980s, the character of Shuggie Bain reflects something of the author’s own difficult childhood.

"Shuggie Bain is destined to be a classic — a moving, immersive and nuanced portrait of a tight-knit social world, its people and its values."   -  Margaret Busby, chair of the Booker Prize Judges 2020

1981, Glasgow. The city is dying. Poverty is on the rise. When her philandering husband walks out, leaving her with three children, Agnes turns to alcohol for comfort. The children try their best to save her. Yet one by one they have to abandon her in order to save themselves. Shuggie still holds out hope. But Shuggie has problems of his own, despite all his efforts to pass as ‘normal’. Agnes wants to protect her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everything. And everyone.

"Readers may get through the whole novel without breaking down - then read the first sentence of the acknowledgements and lose it. The emotional truth embodied here will crack you open. You will never forget Shuggie Bain. Scene by scene, this book is a masterpiece."  -  Kirkus Reviews

"Stuart’s [has a] Grassic Gibbon–like ability to combine love and horror, and to give equal weight to both... Stuart’s capacity for allowing wild contradictions to convincingly coexist is also on display in the individual vignettes that comprise the novel, blending the tragic with the funny, the unsparing with the tender, the compassionate with the excruciating ..."  -  James Walton, The New York Times Book Review

Finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize For Fiction

Douglas Stuart is a Scottish - American writer. He is the author of Young Mungo. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, is the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize.