Shuggie Bain - Winner Booker Prize 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.br>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, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist with a powerful and important story to tell.

Report

A heartbreaking novel, a book both beautiful and brutal . . . All that grief and sadness and misery has been turned into something tough, tender and beautifully sad. The Times

Product details

• Authors: Douglas Stuart, Stuart Douglas
• Publisher: Picador Uk
• Languages: English
• Age Recommendation: from age 18
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 29.02.2020
• EAN: 9781529019285
• ISBN: 978-1-5290-1928-5
• No. of pages: 448
• Dimensions: 153 mm x 234 mm x 33 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Glasgow, FICTION / Coming of Age, FICTION / Family Life / General, Narrative theme: Social issues, Narrative theme: Coming of age, Narrative theme: Sense of place, Narrative theme: Love and relationships, Central Scotland, Of specific Gay interest, C 1980 To C 1990, c 1980 to c 1989, FICTION / Urban & Street Lit, Relating to gay people, FICTION / LGBTQ+ / Gay, Coping with / advice about drug and alcohol problems, Street fiction / urban fiction