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Loading... Shuggie Bain (2020)by Douglas Stuart
  
» 25 more Top Five Books of 2023 (140) Books Read in 2020 (428) Booker Prize (305) Big Jubilee List (14) Books Read in 2022 (980) Five star books (475) Books Read in 2023 (1,627) A's favorite novels (85) Historical Fiction (31) top 100 (35) To Read (27) No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) Craftybilda | Aug 7, 2024 |   )1  IgnatiusMeany | Jun 22, 2024 | He had always loved to brush and play with hair; it was the only thing that made time truly fly. When he had turned sixteen he had promised himself he would go to the hairdressing college that sat south of the River Clyde. He had gathered up all of his inspiration, the sketches he had copied from the Littlewoods catalogue and pages ripped from the Sunday magazines. Then he had gone to Cardonald to see about the evening classes. At the bus stop outside the college he alighted with half a dozen eighteen-year-olds. They wore the newest, most-fashionable gear and talked with a buzzing confidence that masked their own nerves. Shuggie walked half as fast as they did. He watched them go in the front door, then he recrossed the street to catch the bus going the other way. And then the book turns back to when Shuggie was a young child living with his mother Agnes, in her second marriage to the unreliable and violent Shug. Beautiful Agnes Bain has always wanted more than life has given her, but at the age of nearly forty she and her husband and three children are still living with her parents in their council flat, and life has been nothing but a disappointment. Disappointment turns to drink and Agnes's alcoholism becomes more and more in evidence. Eventually it is only the youngest child, Shuggie, who is left to support his mother... This is a moving and very well-written book which provides a believable (and harrowing) account of a broken family in a broken city, Glasgow in the 1980s having lost its traditional industries. Highly Recommended. ( ) SandDune | Jun 16, 2024 | Five stars for the writing, the characterizations (especially mother and son) and the story. Beautiful but bleak, I slowed down mid-book for a time (holidays), but was soon under the [a:Douglas Stuart|20681825|Douglas Stuart|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/u_50x66-632230dc9882b4352d753eedf9396530.png] spell again. My empathy was with little Shuggie abandoned by all to pursue his loyal love for his wasted, alcoholic mammy. The portrayal of public housing tenants in the Galway suburbs is raw with cruelty and need. The men have lost their jobs and drink, fight and fuck away their frustrations. The women scrabble and gossip while trying to feed their too-many babies. Shuggie Bain's mother Beautiful Agnes drinks up everything - food, filial love, belongings and men. But throughout the reader cares about these folks, their dismal stories with flashes of humor, and stays with them throughout the book for its exquisite language and train wreck of a tale, thankful that the author persevered for ten years and thirty rejections toward his Booker prize. (  ) featherbooks | May 7, 2024 | Shuggie Bain is about a child growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s. His mother is an alcoholic, his father is abusive, and they live in poverty. It's about this family, but also about the neighborhoods and towns devastated by economic downturns and joblessness. The aimless prideful men who end up violent and drunk, their wives left on the dole, and the hungry children with no loving adults or role models in their lives. Despite the extremely dark, depressing, and serious themes, the story is told with just the right amount of lightheartedness and humor. The Glaswegian dialect and colorful insults alone had me in stitches. Ultimately the story is hopeful but only after many many chapters watching the inevitable horrors unfold for this poor boy who wants only to be loved. It's hard to "like" a book like this, though I think I did. It was extremely well written, though graphic and gritty to the bone, and tells an important story in a very authentic way. (  ) technodiabla | May 7, 2024 |
Shuggie Bain is set in this world of men run aground after the closure of mines, women sunk under the weight of drink, families living week to week on public assistance and disability benefits. It speaks in a Scottish English whose rhythms, even whose vocabulary, can be alien for American readers: misty with smirr and dusty with stour, its bruisers glaikit in their foolishness, gallus in their pride.... At its center is Agnes Bain, an imperious former beauty in a now-ratty mink whose disintegration Stuart observes lovingly but unsparingly. Shuggie is her youngest, her ward, her protector, and her target. He bobs in her beery wake, no more able to save her than his baby doll, Daphne.... Stuart’s project as a writer is in part about clearing space for tenderness among men, space for love. It is in many ways a harsh, bleak novel, for that decade was a harsh and bleak time in Glasgow, when the shipyards, engineering works and the coalfields on the city’s fringe were closing, and so many of the working-class were no longer working but living on benefits.... There is poverty, squalor and degradation here, much foul language and causal, sometimes brutal sex. What redeems the novel and makes it remarkable is that its central theme is love – a caring, responsible love.... The relationship between Agnes and Shuggie is beautifully, tenderly and understandingly done. Stuart doesn’t sentimentalise it and he hides nothing of the horrors of galloping alcoholism, but there is a gallantry about Agnes which commands respect and admiration, however reluctantly. It is, then, a testament to Douglas Stuart’s talent that all this literary history—along with the tough portraits of Glaswegian working-class life from William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, and Agnes Owens—can be felt in Shuggie Bain without either overshadowing or unbalancing the novel ... Stuart’s [has a] Grassic Gibbon–like ability to combine love and horror, and to give equal weight to both. Not only is Shuggie Bain dedicated to his mother, but in the acknowledgments he writes that 'I owe everything to the memories of my mother and her struggle'; he’s clearly determined to give all the contradictory aspects of that struggle their full due ... Stuart’s capacity for allowing wild contradictions to convincingly coexist is also on display in the individual vignettes that comprise the novel, blending the tragic with the funny, the unsparing with the tender, the compassionate with the excruciating ... Otherwise, the author is too generous—and, it would seem, too fond of his mother—for the central focus to lie anywhere but in the fierce, warm-hearted portrait of Agnes in all her maddening glory. As a result, this overwhelmingly vivid novel is not just an accomplished debut. It also feels like a moving act of filial reverence. ... his novel is resolutely, wonderfully Scottish at heart ... such a delight. 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 ... Agnes is drawn with extraordinary sympathy: she simply leaps from the page as she juggles motherhood, a violent and philandering husband and her own demons, drink foremost among them. She is troubled, lovable, vulnerable and resilient ... This is a deeply political novel, one about the impact of Thatcherism on Glaswegian society ... It is brilliant on the shame of poverty and the small, necessary dignities that keep people going. It is heartbreakingly good on childhood and Shuggie’s growing sense of his otherness, of not being the same as the other boys on the estate ... Douglas Stuart has written a first novel of rare and lasting beauty. With his exquisitely detailed debut novel, Douglas Stuart has given Glasgow something of what James Joyce gave to Dublin. Every city needs a book like Shuggie Bain, one where the powers of description are so strong you can almost smell the chip-fat and pub-smoke steaming from its pages, and hear the particular, localized slang ringing in your ears.... Agnes...is the real heroine of this story, so evocative and striking that she may be one of those characters you never forget. Stuart writes about Shuggie, a lonely, loving boy struggling with his sexuality, with skill. But the depiction pales in comparison to the sheer, knock-out force of what he managed to create with Agnes ... Shuggie Bain is full of people doing and saying awful things to one another all the time, but nobody really seems truly awful. Maybe this is what makes the novel so powerful and sad—it turns over the ugly side of humanity to find the softness and the beauty underneath. Belongs to Publisher SeriesMirmanda (210) AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
HTML: WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE A stunning debut novel by a masterful writer telling the heartwrenching story of a young boy and his alcoholic mother, whose love is only matched by her pride. Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings. Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good—her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamorous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion's share of each week's benefits—all the family has to live on—on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs. Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Shuggie is meanwhile struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is "no right," a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her—even her beloved Shuggie. A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. Recalling the work of Édouard Louis, Alan Hollinghurst, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist who has a powerful and important story to tell. .No library descriptions found. 
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