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.

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!

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.

It took me an unusually long time to get through this book because I found it very painful to read. The description of the lives of Agnes, the alcoholic mother, and her three children was so specific and felt so real that I kept hoping that it wasn’t autobiographical. Then I got to the acknowledgements, and my fears were confirmed. Children should not have to contend with the mood swings or states of drunkenness of their parents. And they shouldn’t have to become the parents in the family.

Shuggie, the youngest child, was left behind as his philandering father left and his older siblings managed to escape from the chaos surrounding Agnes. Shuggie was also a boy who didn’t quite fit in with his schoolmates. At least he did learn resilience from his mother. ”Everyday with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she has 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.”

This book contains multiple rapes, child molestation and men who are too horrible to be allowed to live. When you get to the sentence “What baby?” you’ll know why I wanted them all to die a painful death in a filthy ditch.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher.

This is a heart-breaker. Have your tissues ready. What a great story that rings true with tone, characters, and overall plot.

Shuggie Bain is a story about a family devastated by the effects of poverty, abuse, alcoholism, and other devastating realities that came along with the Thatcher policies enacted in Glasgow in the 1980s.

This was a hard book to get through; it’s subject matter often so grim and shattering that I had to step away for awhile because of how effectively it was portrayed. Well done, Stuart ! Did I mention this is the author’s debut novel? Again, I say, well done!

You follow the Bain family from the time that Shuggie is a young child, all the way to his teen years. Seeing the struggles as well as the brief hints of light that shine on them all, but particularly Shuggie and his mother, Agnes. Between the relationships Agnes has with the men in her life (most of which are far less than healthy) and the all too accurate portrayal of what it’s like to be the child of an alcoholic parent (is the parent the parent, or is the child the parent? Unhealthy bonds and no safe place to call home), it hits hard. This is very much a family and individual character centered story, so if that is your cup of tea then you may want to pick this one up!
I’m not sure what more to say other than that this book really touched on the right places. The writing was real and it was not hard to fall deep into the world, the very true to life world that existed then and in some areas still exists today.

Whilst I do believe this book is going on my “favorites of 2020” list, a few other things should be mentioned:
-The dialect may take awhile to adjust to if you’re not already familiar.
-Content warnings should be given for rape, physical abuse, mental abuse, substance abuse, and gambling.
-Lastly, I would reiterate that this is a dark book and from personal experience would avoid reading it if you are not in a good place mentally.

I was given a copy of this title from Grove Atlantic via Netgalley in return for an honest review.

The writing here is simply gorgeous. The scenes and characters carefully and sympathetically drawn. But, the novel is dark and the lack of plot to drive it forward makes an already long novel, even longer.

Wonderful read. Fantastic debut. I knew I would love this from the title and the cover photograph. It was as good as I thought it might be. Sad but not depressing it was ultimately uplifting. I was lucky enough to get a review copy from #Netgalley; also I listened to part of it on audio and the narrators Scottish accent added to it. My grandparents and mum were/are Scottish and I lived for a few years in Glasgow so it was easy to picture the closes and schemes. Details like the Kensitas cigarettes brought the story vividly to life.
I didn’t find it hard to read/listen to as some readers, and only a few times did I feel uncomfortable due to the subject matter (alcoholism). Mostly the story was carried by the strong characterisation and I enjoyed that we did not just have Shuggies viewpoint but the whole family’s.
I believe this book will take the author far and that it will become popular. Detail throughout was beautiful. Talented author. As a postscript I liked the plug for Alateen as some people may not know about it. Thoroughly enjoyed the hours spent with this book. This review appears on Amazon and Waterstones.

Shuggie Bain is one of those novels where, for me, the form let down the content. This is a story about alcoholism, abuse, and poverty, and it is unremitting in its depiction of those things. For all its heavy subject matter, though, it left me largely impassive. It felt like the more the narrative wanted me to feel, the less I actually felt.

The crux of my problem with this novel is its form--that is, its narrative structure and writing style. The writing in Shuggie Bain falls under the weight of its story, not necessarily on a sentence-by-sentence basis, but on a more holistic level.

The narrative, here, suffers from a kind of stasis: it's repetitive, lacking dynamism in both character and plot. Over and over again we see Agnes, the main character in Shuggie Bain aside from Shuggie himself, engage in the same cycle of abuse: she drinks, she gets herself into increasingly precarious situations, she tries to quit drinking, she is seemingly on the mend, and then she relapses. Of course, I can recognize that this kind of cycle exists for many of those who have struggled with substance abuse; I never expected Agnes to get over years of substance abuse after a single attempt to quit drinking. My issue is that narratively, it didn't make for very engaging reading. It's one thing to be reading about the same plot point happening over and over again; it's another thing to have that plot point be about substance abuse, physical abuse, and sexual abuse. The end result was that not only did I start to get impatient with the novel, but I also just started to feel increasingly distanced from and indifferent to its story.

More than that, though, I felt like I never got to know the characters beyond their suffering. There were a few scenes here and there that had genuinely earnest and caring character interactions, but beyond that it was just more of the same: characters either inflicting or being subjected to abuse.

To put it simply, Shuggie Bain largely prioritized the situational over the psychological: the overwhelming need to buy alcohol when you're already extremely financially straitened, the binge drinking and subsequent blackouts, the vulnerability that comes with being a child of an alcoholic mother. What I wanted from Shuggie Bain was to emphasize the psychological alongside the situational, to give me a closer look into the thoughts and emotions of its characters, to make me feel like I knew them and not just the things they did or the things that happened to them.

I want to tread carefully here because I don't want my criticism of this book to be "it was too depressing." Depressing things happen in the world; it feels like a bit of a disservice to call experiences that many people have gone through "too depressing," especially for a novel like this where, I believe, at least some of the story is autobiographical. My problem is not that it was a depressing story, but that it wasn't a particularly well told one.

I know I've been talking about the form and content of a novel as if they're two separate things, but really when it comes down to it, they're inextricable. The content doesn't exist without the form. When a story isn't told well, it doesn't matter how good or bad it is; the end result is just a poorly told story.