Description
Author: Stuart, Douglas
Brand: Picador
Edition: Main Market
Package Dimensions: 40x236x620
Number Of Pages: 448
Release Date: 06-08-2020
Details: Product Description
Winner of the Booker Prize 2020
Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction 2020
The Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2020
‘Douglas Stuart has written a first novel of rare and lasting beauty.’ – Observer
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.
‘We were bowled over by this first novel, which creates an amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love.’ – The judges of the Booker Prize
Review
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
Leaves us gutted and marvelling: Life may be short, but it takes forever. ―
New York Times
Rarely does a debut novel establish its world with such sure-footedness, and Stuart’s prose is
lithe, lyrical and full of revelatory descriptive insights. — Alex Preston ―
Observer
An astonishing portrait, drawn from life, of a society left to die . . .
Shuggie Bain has been longlisted for the Booker Prize. In a just world, it would win. ―
Daily Telegraph
Shuggie Bain comes from a deep understanding of the relationship between a child and a substance-abusing parent,
showing a world rarely portrayed in literary fiction . . . Admirable and important. — Sarah Moss ―
Guardian
This is
a dysfunctional love story . . . between a boy and his mother . . . what makes his book a worthy contender for the Booker is his portrayal of their bond, together with all its perpetual damage. ―
Financial Times
Douglas Stuart’s startling Glasgow-set debut novel creates a world of poverty and suffering offset by pure, heart-filling, love . . .
It’s a novel that deserves, and will surely often get, a second reading. — Allan Massie ―
Scotsman
Shuggie Bain
is a novel that aims for the heart and finds it. — John Self ―
The Times
Tender and unsentimental . . . and the Billy Elliot-ish character of Shuggie . . . leaps off the page. ―
Daily Mail
Beautiful and bleak but
with enough warmth and optimism to carry the reader through. — Graham Norton (via Twitter)
From the Back Cover
‘Beautiful and bleak but with enough warmth and optimism to carry the reader through.’ Graham Norton (on Twitter)‘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.’ Washington Post ‘[Shuggie Bain] would be just about unbearable were it not for the author’s astonishing capacity for love . . . The book leaves us gutted and marveling: Life may be short, but it takes forever.’ New York Times‘A boy’s heartbreaking love for his mother . . . as intense and excruciating to read as any novel I have ever held in my hand . . . brillian
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