Stuart's writing is fantastic and the scenes are beautifully brought to life - maybe if I was the kind of reader who only read for language and not for story I'd be more impressed with Shuggie Bain but I'm not. I needed more than this predictably grim and repetitive portrayal of working class life and addiction that went on and on, driving home its point of - what, that Thatcher's government was bad for northerners? Eh. We don't need a book on something quite so banal. I can see why it won the Booker, and it's not bad if you aren't looking for a particularly driving storyline, or one remotely original, but it wasn't for me.

You know those books you read that you just know will stay with you forever? The ones that are written so well you feel like you actually know the characters and are a part of their world with them for a little while. Books that rip out your heart, make you hold your breath, and make you reread passages over and over. Books like A LIttle Life or The Hearts Invisible Furies... well Shuggie Bain is one of those books. It has instantly become one of my all time favourites, and I know I will never forget the story of Shuggie and Agnes.

Set in Glasgow in the 1980's, in the housing projects, it is the story Shuggie and his life with his alcoholic mother Agnes. It's absolutely devastating, and heart breaking, but the writing is incredible and it makes you just hang in there on the edge of your seat the whole time.

I love Shuggie, and his brother Leek, and through all her faults I was also just wishing and hoping for the best for Agnes. No wonder this won the Booker Prize.

I very very highly recommend this one.

Shuggie Bain is a heartbreaking coming of age story. The title character's plight stayed with me for days after reading this book.

What a moving book. Having experienced living with someone suffering from alcoholism, the book was not just a stunning read, but personal. As the family struggles to survive Agnes' demons, poverty, and the unsettled circumstances of their lives, Shuggie keeps trying to keep it together. A tough read, but one with so much feeling, you see a smidgen of beauty in Shuggie's love and perseverance. (his waiting outside to try to judge the condition of his mother took my breath away. I remember those moments).

What a beautiful heartbreaking book. Written with so much love it oozed off the page. Amazingly fresh for a story as old as time. Just beautiful

Shuggie is a Scottish boy, named after his father, Big Shug. He lives with his grandparents, mother, father, sister and brother in a tenement flat. His father is a taxi driver; his mother stays at home. Shug is her second husband and Shuggie's brother and sister are from her first marriage. Shug hates living with his in-laws and he convinces Agnes, the mother, to move to a new flat a few miles away. The surprise is that when the family gets there, Big Shug doesn't move in. He has found a new woman and leaves the family there with no transportation.
The other big fact about Shuggie's life is that Agnes drinks. Not a little bit but a lot. She regularly gets so drunk that she passes out. She spends the welfare money on drink, leaving the children with no food in the house. She alternates between treating them as small children and over loving them or ignoring them or cursing them when the drink is on her. This is the normal for Shuggie as he has never known anything else. He believes that it is his job to make Agnes better no matter what price that extracts from him.

Shuggie is a kind boy, a boy who thinks of others. The kids at school call him posh and accuse him of being gay and maybe he is; he's not sure about any of that. As the years go by, first his sister and then his brother leave to try to make their own lives. Shuggie is the one who stays by Agnes as she is taken advantage of by men, as she drinks up everything they own. He feeds her when there is food in the house, he draws her baths, he undresses her and puts her to bed. But he never loses hope and he never loses the kindness in his heart.

This book won the 2020 Booker award. I listened to it and the narrator's Scottish brogue added to my enjoyment of the novel. This is a novel that will stick in the reader's mind and Shuggie and his determination to rise above his circumstances will endear him to readers and make him memorable. Although the story is bleak, no one will regret meeting Shuggie. This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.

What can I say about ‘Shuggie Bain’ by Douglas Stuart. Probably the best novel of 2020 in my opinion. I absolutely loved this book which sounds quite weird as it is quite a depressing story. The character of Shuggie shines through and gives the story hope. My husband is from Glasgow and having visited on many occasions I felt immersed in the areas where the novel is set. Congratulations to Douglas Stuart on this wonderful novel, a worthy winner of the 2020 Booker prize.

Reading Shuggie Bain is an emotionally gripping experience. The reader will hold and unfold and dark world of addiction, abuse, poverty and the complexities of relationships.
Hugh ‘Shuggie’ Bain is a lonely, loving boy labeled as ‘no right’ but he does not see what that difference is. His mother (Agnes) sees this ‘difference’ in him with understanding but the throes of her alcohol addiction overshadows everyone and everything that surrounds her in dreary Glasgow. Abandoned by her husband, her wanting and dreams of a better life have been shattered. Underneath her make-up, false teeth, beehive hair-do and painted lips, she is struggling through her failures and coping through drink which leads to more dysfunction and disappointment.. Shuggie’s love for his mother is the bright light that shines through this bleak and desperate world.
This is an eye opening novel that is overwhelming and heartbreaking but so worth the read.
The characters intertwine but through Douglas Stuart’s prose stand alone with equal amounts of strength and sympathy and Shuggie’s determination to rise above it all.
Highly recommended with thanks to NetGalley and Grove Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest book review.

I did a half read / half listen to Shuggie Bain, and I gravitated much more toward the audiobook version. Hearing the accents was much easier for me to understand than the way the dialect is written.

Shuggie Bain is the coming of age story of a young boy living in poverty in Glasgow Scotland in the 1980s. More so than just a story of Shuggie, it's really a look at the entire Bain family, with a huge emphasis on his mother, Agnes and Shuggie's relationship with her.

I tend to gravitate towards heavy-themed dramas, but even for me, this one was bleak. It's a story of poverty, addiction, and neglect... and it left me a little gutted. That said, it's well written and it'll stick with me... so despite not "enjoying it," I'm still glad I read it.

Phenomenal story telling. A book that’s hard to read and hard to put down in the best way possible. Such an interesting kens into 1970s-1990sScotlamd.

This is a straightforward novel, written in a traditional way, with very good writing, vividly drawn characters and an incredibly moving story, that comments on a place, a society and a time period in a quiet, but very powerful way. Haven't read something like this for a long time.

Dark, brutal, bleak, gritty, unflinching, sad – all these, yes, but at the same time the book manages to transcend it all to present us with a deeply moving and well-written account of a poverty-stricken childhood in a novel that is intelligent, insightful and deeply empathetic. A 1980s Glasgow working-class boyhood scarred by poverty and a mother’s addiction, a woman battling her demons, disenchanted with the narrow life her poverty condemns her to, a son who in spite of it all loves her unconditionally. A worthy winner of the Booker 2020.

I found this book to be extremely emotive as someone who has experienced a close family member struggle with alcoholism. The long timeline and general length of the book made me feel very invested in the family as a whole. The setting was a bit dreary, but I think that fit the overall tone of the book. I loved the queer representation that took place within the narrative.

"To have marked her sobriety in days was like watching a happy weekend bleed by: when you watched it, it was always too short. So he just stopped counting."

Douglas Stuart’s debut novel SHUGGIE BAIN is a raw coming-of-age story about the relationship between a young boy and his alcoholic mother. Though at times agonizing, this book is not all pain. Love and compassion are present throughout the story even when the characters are at their worst.

Under Margaret Thatcher, Glasgow in the 1980s is in collapse: the coal mines and shipyards are closing and working-class families live in poverty. This is the world of the Bain family who are in a constant losing battle with the matriarch Agnes’s alcoholism. At the center of the story is Shuggie, the youngest Bain, who idolizes his tragic mother. Shuggie’s father is absent and his siblings have escaped, leaving him to care for Agnes as she drinks herself to death. At the same time, Shuggie is struggling to understand why everyone thinks he is “no right” just because he is effeminate and doesn’t act like other boys.

SHUGGIE BAIN is an immersive book. The use of Glasgowian dialect and phonetically written prose paired with vivid characters and settings, creates a story that I didn’t just read but became completely absorbed in. The descriptive details like prying open the meter for change, the grit of the coal mines, and the sour stench of fortified lager made the book come to life.

As a gay person, I saw myself in Shuggie’s struggle to be “like a real boy” and the confusion that everyone realized something about him before he even understood it himself. Though the book is named for Shuggie, at times it feels like Agnes’s story. That's very fitting since addicts dominate the lives of those around them, forcing everything to be experienced through the lens of their addiction. Agnes and Shuggie are unforgettable characters that are rendered with deep intimacy and affection.

SHUGGIE BAIN left me absolutely gutted in the best way possible. My heart broke over and over. The care and detail put into this book cannot be faked, it clearly comes not only from Stuart’s own lived experiences but from his heart. The intimate and unflinching depiction of the corrosiveness of addiction and this troubled mother/son relationship is unlike any story I’ve read. SHUGGIE BAIN is without a doubt a masterpiece and modern classic!

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Shuggie Bain tells the story of a young boy and his alcoholic mother, struggling to survive together or often despite each other. It's gritty and dark and painful, and in the end offers very little hope. I don't need hope to get through a book (believe me, I love a good soul-crushingly sad book!) and I recognize that this book has received a lot of critical acclaim, but I really struggled with it. Somewhat necessarily due to the focus on Agnes and her alcoholism, the plot is scattered and messy. Watching Agnes's struggles and Shuggie's desperate clinging to her is difficult, which I see is an important tactic to make readers to witness the abuse and addiction we often turn away from. In the end, I wish it had done more than present 400 pages of trauma.

Dysfunctional love. Addiction. Poverty. Abuse, both physical and emotional. Despair. Loneliness. Sexual confusion. Hunger. Guilt. Pride. So many themes and such heart-tugging characters. An amazing and desolate novel that holds the reader, even tho the outcome is no surprise. One only wishes the best for Shuggie when the last page is turned.

Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Press for the ARC to read and review.

If you only read one work of literary fiction this year, make it Shuggie Bain. This is a book that will break your heart, and if it doesn’t, then I would argue that you don’t have one. It’s a book of family love, addiction, and heartbreak in which young Shuggie comes of age amidst the unemployment of Thatcher - era Scotland. Singing prose, and gentle humor are mixed with the harsh and brutal disappointment that is Shuggie’s family life.
Don't miss this one. Highest possible recommendation for this book which I hope wins all the awards this year!

"Shuggie Bain" is a scorching tour de force, a coming-of-age novel centered on a Scottish boy awash in the ruins of his pretty, refined mother's alcoholism. In the early 80s, Shuggie grows up amidst the descent into poverty of his family: wayward taxi driver Shug, who abandons them; Agnes, forced from Glasgow into the dire hell of a mining town and descending into the bottle; spirited sister Catherine; and beleagured brother Leek. It's the youngest, Shuggie, the most sensitive and imaginative of them all, who comes to love his mother deepest and longest, and the novel is the author's keening paean to that devotion and love. In lush yet devastating prose, the novel sweeps us onward through a grim, grim saga that somehow lifts us up, lifts us up just as I recall Cormac McCarthy's The Road doing all those years ago. Shuggie Bain is a bleak journey but it is among the most powerful books I have read this year.

Thank you, Grove Press and NetGalley for sending me this book for review.

This novel is an aching and heart wrenching story about a young boy’s efforts to take care of his mother and rescue her from alcoholism. Shuggie is the son from Agnes’s second marriage to Shugh Bain. She has two older children, Catherine and Alexander (Leek), from her first marriage. Stuart establishes at the very beginning the superficial behaviour of Agnes and her tendency for drink. She is busy playing cards with her friends abandoning her children, leaving Catherine to tend to her youngest son Shuggie. Her husband arrives, and once again Stuart loses no time to show that he has a roving eye and his affection for his wife is now a thing of the past. Stuart again reminds of Agnes’s shallow nature by stressing that this is the man whom Agnes has married and for whom she has left her first husband, Brendan McGowan, a simple, easy going and industrious man, merely because he lacked the charisma and the sheen of Shug.
Agnes is abandoned first by her husband Shug;,Catherine leaves her at the first opportune moment and flees to Africa, as far as she can get; Leek is absorbed in his art; and, hence, it is Shuggie who has to deal with his mother’s alcoholism. Though the novel is autobiographical to a very great extent and the author portrays Agnes with great love, it is difficult to have much sympathy for Agnes. She has no compunctions of spending her entire allowance on alcohol and leaving Shuggie to starve. She is pretentious, proud and vain and sticks out like a sore thumb in a society of miner’s families and always manages to make the other women dislike her intensely. Stuart conveys very powerfully Shuggie’s helplessness harassed by his school mates, his love for his mother and his hope that things will improve. One of the achievements of the book is Stuart’s capacity to describe harrowing and devastating scenes with compassion but without melodrama and sentimentality. The family moves from one area to another with the hope of a fresh beginning but this never happens. There is a political undertone to the novel as it is set in the 1980s with Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister, with unemployment, and widespread poverty all over the country. Stuart describes in a powerful manner the unconditional love the son lavishes on the mother and the tender care with which he takes care of her, travelling vast distances to ensure her safety, cleaning the mucus and the vomit which result from her excessive drinking. Stuart delineates his characters with great accuracy and poignancy. The Scottish slang, which is not always easy to follow, adds authenticity to the raw and bleak backdrop of the novel.
However, the novel does seem to be longwinded and self-indulgent. It could have been more powerful if it had been edited; after all, how much can you describe the life of an alcoholic without being repetitive about the drinking binges, the aftermath of hangover and sickness.

"Shuggie heard the nurse say to a male attendant that she thought for sure Agnes was a working girl. "She is not," said Shuggie, quite proudly. "My mother has never worked a day in her life. She is far too good-looking for that."

It's the 1980's, Glasgow, Scotland at the height of unemployment and poverty, after mines an shipyards closed under Thatcher's government. This is the terribly sad story of Shuggie Bain and his coplex feelings towards his mother, Agnes who is both is hero and a woman who is drowning in her sorrows and addiction. But despite her failings, Shuggie loves his mother deeply.

The strong Scottish dialect takes a little time to get used to, but once you are, I found it very readable.

I would recommend that you are in a good mental space when reading this as there are quite a few triggers - addiction, sexual identity, abuse. But this is a book that I highly recommend.

Thank you very much to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for the e ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.