Shuggie Bain

Winner of the Booker PrizeWinner of 'Book of the Year' and 'Debut of the Year' at the British Book AwardsA BBC 'Big Jubilee Read''An amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love.' – The judges of the Booker Prize'Douglas Stuart has written a first novel of rare and lasting beauty.' – ObserverIt is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life, dreaming of greater things. But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and 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, he is clearly 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.Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride. For readers of A Little Life and Angela's Ashes, it is a heartbreaking novel by a brilliant writer with a powerful and important story to tell.'A heartbreaking novel' – The Times'Tender and unsentimental . . . The Billy Elliot-ish character of Shuggie . . . leaps off the page.' – Daily Mail

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., Leaves us gutted and marvelling: Life may be short, but it takes forever., I think it’s the best first book I’ve read in many years., 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., 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.

Douglas Stuart was born and raised in Glasgow. After graduating from the Royal College of Art, he moved to New York, where he began a career in fashion design. Shuggie Bain, his first novel, won the Booker Prize and the Sue Kaufman Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction, the Kirkus Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. He is also the author of Young Mungo and his short stories have appeared in the New Yorker and his essay on Gender, Anxiety and Class was published by Lit Hub. He lives in New York.

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