Shuggie Bain

Shuggie Bain is the debut novel by Scottish-American writer Douglas Stuart, published in 2020. It tells the story of the youngest of the three children, Shuggie, growing up with his alcoholic mother, Agnes, in the 1980s, in a post-industrial working-class Glasgow, Scotland.
The novel was awarded the 2020 Booker Prize, making Stuart the second Scottish winner of the prize in its 51-year history, following James Kelman in 1994. "Shuggie Bain" was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction and a finalist for the 2020 John Leonard Prize for Best First Book from the National Book Critics Circle. It was also selected as a notable book by the American Library Association on their 2021 ALA Notable lists for adult fiction.
Plot.
In 1992 Hugh "Shuggie" Bain is fifteen years old and living alone in a boarding house in Glasgow. He aspires to be a hairdresser while working shifts at a supermarket deli. He leaves work, placing tin cans of fish in his bag.
In 1981 five-year-old Shuggie is living in a tenement flat in Sighthill with his maternal grandparents, Wullie and Lizzie; his mother, Agnes Bain; his father, Hugh "Shug" Bain; his half-brother, Leek; and his half-sister, Catherine. Shuggie's father is mostly absent, working as a cab driver and having affairs with other women. Agnes is a beautiful woman often compared to Elizabeth Taylor, but she is unfulfilled by her life and takes to drinking.
The following year Shug moves the family into a council flat in Pithead for families of workers of the local mine. He ultimately abandons the family there, leaving them to live with Joanie Micklewhite, the dispatcher of his cab company. Agnes desires a life of glamour, taking pride in her appearance, but her unhappiness drives her reliance on alcohol. Meanwhile, Shuggie is bullied at school and in the neighbourhood for not fitting in and for being effeminate. Shuggie often misses school to act as his mother's caregiver during her hangovers.
Agnes' parents die and her daughter marries young, moving to South Africa. Agnes' alcoholism worsens, and she is taken advantage of by abusive men. Her future looks brighter when she starts going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and takes a job as a petrol-station attendant. She manages to stay off drink completely for a year, during which time she meets a cab driver named Eugene, whom she begins to date. Eugene often drinks in front of her during dinners. He eventually convinces Agnes to drink a glass of wine, and she relapses into alcoholism. Put off by her alcoholism, Eugene leaves her. After a sexual assault at a party she attends when drunk, Agnes downward spirals and loses her job. She makes multiple suicide attempts over the next few years.
Agnes' alcoholism continues to alienate her from her children. In one of her drunken rages, she kicks Leek out of the house. Despite her behaviour, Shuggie maintains an unwavering devotion to her. The two of them move to a new neighborhood, and Agnes promises to stop drinking, but unable to change their circumstances, their relationship becomes strained as Shuggie grows older. In a drunken stupor, Agnes dies after inhaling her own saliva.
In 1992 Shuggie gives the tins of fish to his friend Leanne, who gives them to her homeless alcoholic mother.
Publication.
The manuscript was rejected by at least 30 publishers before it was purchased by the American independent publisher, Grove Atlantic. It was first published in the United States in hardcover by Grove Press on 11 February 2020. Later, the Picador imprint of Pan Macmillan published it in the United Kingdom first as a softback open market edition (OME) on 20 February 2020, and as a hardcover on 6 August 2020. A German translation will be released in August 2021 by Hanser Berlin.
The Grove Press cover features a photograph by Peter Marlow. Douglas Stuart expressed a fondness for the photograph, saying "it captures perfectly the fierce love that Shuggie has for his troubled mother". The Picador cover features a photograph by Jez Coulson, shot in Easterhouse, Glasgow (about which Stuart tweeted on 13 August 2020:" I was instantly struck by the power of Jez's photo the moment I saw it").
Reception.
The novel was widely reviewed, generally positively. Writing in "The Observer", Alex Preston said: "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. This is a memorable book about family, violence and sexuality." Reviewing for "The New York Times", Leah Hager Cohen wrote that "the book would be just about unbearable were it not for the author's astonishing capacity for love. He's lovely, Douglas Stuart, fierce and loving and lovely. He shows us lots of monstrous behavior, but not a single monster — only damage. If he has a sharp eye for brokenness, he is even keener on the inextinguishable flicker of love that remains."
In the "Daily Telegraph", Cal Revely-Calder called the novel "an astonishing portrait, drawn from life, of a society left to die – forgotten by those who didn't believe in society, and told it to care for itself." Allan Massie in "The Scotsman" noted that Stuart "hides nothing of the horrors of galloping alcoholism, but there is a gallantry about Agnes which commands respect and admiration, however reluctantly." The review in "Kirkus" concluded: "How can love be so powerful and so helpless at the same time? Readers may get through the whole novel without breaking down—then read the first sentence of the acknowledgements and lose it. The emotional truth embodied here will crack you open. You will never forget Shuggie Bain. Scene by scene, this book is a masterpiece." Comparing the book to another of the year's Booker Prize shortlisted works, "Real Life" by Brandon Taylor, Shougat Dasgupta noted in "The Hindu" that both novels were "bound by a sense of dread and a groping towards love", and went on to describe "Shuggie Bain" as a part of a "rich seam of contemporary Scottish working class writing." Summarising, the review stated: "Occasionally, "Shuggie Bain", with its sentimentality and overwhelming squalor, can veer close to self-parody but is always pulled back from the brink by its enormous heart, by the enormous love that binds Shuggie to Agnes."
"Shuggie Bain" was longlisted for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, shortlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, and was a finalist for the 2020 Kirkus Prize as well as the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. On 19 November 2020, it was announced as the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, chosen by a judging panel comprising Margaret Busby (chair), Lee Child, Sameer Rahim, Lemn Sissay, and Emily Wilson. Interviewed at the time of his Booker longlisting, Stuart said that the previous Scottish winner of the prize, James Kelman's "How Late It Was, How Late" (1994), changed his life and was "one of the first times I saw my people, my dialect, on the page".
The novel went to the top of the "Los Angeles Times" bestsellers list and to number 3 on the "New York Times" list. It headed "The Telegraph"s list of "The 50 best books of 2020" and was picked by "The Times" as the year's best novel, in addition to being named as one of the best books of the year by many other publications and outlets, including "The New York Times", "The Washington Post", "Time", the BBC, "The Guardian", "The Observer", the "Financial Times", "Kirkus Reviews", "Vogue" and "Elle".
Television adaptation.
A24 and Scott Rudin Productions won the rights for a television adaptation of "Shuggie Bain", with Scott Rudin and Eli Bush as producers and Stuart himself set to adapt the novel.