This year’s Booker Prize winner, Shuggie Bain, is an incredibly powerful and challenging debut novel of love, loss, and perseverance that brings light to struggle and inspires a hope for something more. As a fictional account of Stuart’s own childhood in ‘80s Glasgow, it brings an emotional and fearsome reality to life and it will break your heart over and over.
Douglas Stuart
Shuggie Bain portrays an era filled with poverty, where the working class is at the mercy of misery as they face hunger, unemployment, violence, and addiction. Survival, however possible, is the goal, and it is in this world that we find the story of Hugh ‘Shuggie’ Bain and his tough, lonely childhood. Shuggie’s mother Agnes finds herself living in run-down public housing where Thatcher’s policies have decimated mining towns, leaving fathers and sons out of work. Married to a philandering taxi-driver, Agnes’ pride is in looking good but she finds herself increasingly turning to alcohol to find solace. Shuggie is left to care for his mother, enduring her swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety, despite his own struggles of not ‘being normal’.
Agnes’ fight with addiction and the heartache it brings grips the reader throughout this story. We are witness to its all-consuming effects on not only Agnes, but also those close by who bear the emotional and psychological brunt of pain. Agnes dreams of more for herself and her family, to give her children the best possible life. Yet the pull of alcohol is unwavering, dragging her back time and time again and ensuring these dreams are left locked away.
At the heart of this novel, however, is Shuggie Bain himself. His love for his mother is steadfast, despite the grief of addiction and the role of primary caregiver he often finds himself in. Shuggie also endures persistent torment from other children. He craves normality, but others have seen what he hasn’t yet: he’s ‘no right’. Shuggie’s story is intense with anguish and suffering that seems so unfair, yet was a reality for so many at this time, and Stuart tells his story with such love.
Having finished it, I can say with certainty that the judging panel of the Booker prize chose rightly this year in making Shuggie Bain the winning novel of 2020. This is a powerful story that doesn’t shy away from the harsh reality many faced in the 1980s. It’s one that needed to be told, and one I needed to read.
—Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Pan Macmillan Australia) is out now.
Shuggie Bain
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...
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