Shuggie Bain - Reading Guide
A guide to Douglas Stuart’s moving and compassionate 2020 Booker-winning novel about the unequal struggle between addiction and a child’s love
Won the Booker Prize in 2020. Douglas Stuart’s blistering and heartbreaking debut is an exploration of the unsinkable love that only children can have for their damaged parents
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.
Douglas Stuart
About the Author
Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize in 2020. He was born and raised in Glasgow. Shuggie Bain is his widely acclaimed debut novelVideo highlights
Douglas Stuart on Shuggie Bain
‘It’s very Scottish to face difficult things frankly. The hardest-done-to Glaswegians are the most compassionate and giving people I have ever met. They also have so much humility that they have an aversion to anyone thinking they have it especially bad, because so many people suffered through a difficult time under Thatcher in the 1980s, and we were certainly all in it together. Mammies and Grannies will not put up with your complaining because if you think you have it bad…oh! When you don’t have the comfort of money, then you are forced to deal with life on the front lines, and sometimes love, humour, optimism is all you can bring to a bad situation. I think Glasgow is a city of reluctant optimists by default. How would we have survived otherwise?’
Read the full interview here
What the critics said
Mike Maggio, The Washington Independent Review of Books
‘This is an instant classic. A novel that takes places during the Thatcher years and, in a way, defines it. A novel that explores the underbelly of Scottish society. A novel that digs through the grit and grime of 1980s Glasgow to reveal a story that is at once touching and gripping.’
Henry Bankhead, Library Journal
‘In exquisite detail, the book describes the devastating dysfunction in Shuggie’s family, centering on his mother’s alcoholism and his father’s infidelities, which are skillfully related from a child’s viewpoint. It also shows how daily trauma within the family wrecks a child’s psyche […] As it beautifully and shockingly illustrates how Shuggie ends up alone, this novel offers a testament to the indomitable human spirit. Very highly recommended.’
Mari Carlson, BookPage
‘Stuart’s anxious novel is both a tragedy and a survival story. Shuggie is as neglected as Glasgow, but through his mother’s demise, he discovers his strength. Shuggie Bain celebrates taking charge of one’s own destiny.’
Colm Tóibín, BookForum
‘The Scottish novelists have it in for clear plotlines, for gentle or melancholy stories, for bourgeois destinies, for old-fashioned or boring narrative systems. They write spectacularly well about drunkenness, drug-induced antics, long nights wandering in the lower depths, states of alienation, bad sex. This is the tradition out of which Douglas Stuart writes […] In a Scottish novel, if there is a dream of better public housing, it will end in a high-rise slowly falling apart, just like the buildings that house the Bain family, which are desolate and badly constructed. And, in Scottish fiction, if there is a line of dialogue, it will be filled with the flavor of demotic Scottish speech. Stuart, in Shuggie Bain, is particularly skilled at creating a credible, energetic, living speech for his Scottish characters.’
Sue De Groot, The Sunday Times
‘The words ‘powerful’, ‘compelling’ and ‘a universal story’ are used in many book reviews. Rarely are they as appropriate as when applied to Shuggie Bain. Douglas Stuart’s transcendent debut novel might be set in the bleakest reaches of Glasgow in the 1980s, but the characters that pop and crackle and snap in Scottish dialect from its pages are people we know: people with fatal flaws and lovable eccentricities; people trying by whatever means possible to crawl through to the end of each grinding day; people fed and fuelled by the illusion of a better tomorrow.’
What the Booker Prize Book Club said
‘Like the author and Shuggie, I grew up in a alcoholic home, so I found it quite triggering (that’s not a criticism; rather it’s indicative of just how realistic the novel is). My situation was nowhere near as bad as Shuggie’s, but, boy, I could relate. I had to keep putting it aside. Once I got about halfway through, though, I couldn’t put it down and read the 2nd half in two days.
It is definitely disturbing, but also tender in the way Shuggie cares for his mother. In my opinion, the Booker was well deserved. If you haven’t read it and don’t mind novels that are bleak and disturbing (I love them—A Little Life, anyone?), I strongly recommend it. I suspect this one will stay with me.’
Anita George, The Booker Prize Book Club
The Booker Prize Book Club
When I was writing the book I didn't tell anyone I was trying to write it because I wanted it to be an incredibly personal project
Listen to an extract from Shuggie Bain
Angus King reads the audiobook of Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain.
Pan Macmillan Audio · Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, read by Angus King
The characters in Shuggie Bain couldn’t exist anywhere else; Glasgow is as much in their blood as it is in mine
The winning moment
In what was an extraordinary year, the Booker Prize went online for the first time in 2020.
The pandemic meant that Douglas Stuart was at home in New York when he was announced as the winner for his debut novel Shuggie Bain.
The author and the other shortlistees took part in the virtual ceremony, which also included a message from President Barack Obama.
In a post-win interview, Stuart said: ‘I grew up in Glasgow, in the 1980s, which was an incredibly tough time for a lot of people there. And my mother, unfortunately, suffered with addiction, and she didn’t survive that addiction: she died when I was still a child.
‘And so for thirty years I’ve carried a lot of loss and love and pain, and I wanted really just to tell the story of what it was like to grow up queer in Glasgow with a parent who you loved but you couldn’t save, and Shuggie is a work of fiction, it is, but writing the book was incredibly healing for me. I think men from the West Coast of Scotland are not ever expected to be able to express their feelings, or their finer feelings, and so art is a great receptacle for that. And to be able to connect with people and to ask for empathy from readers - and they’ve really given it - has been just hugely cathartic.’
Winning author Douglas Stuart reacts to the news he has won at the 2020 Booker Prize Awards Ceremony, broadcast in partnership with the BBC, at the Roundhouse in London
© David Parry/PA WireShuggie 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
