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Shuggie Bain: Winner of the Booker Prize 2020 Hardcover – August 6, 2020
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Winner of the Booker Prize 2020
Winner of 'Book of the Year' at the British Book Awards 2021
Winner of 'Debut of the Year' at the British Book Awards 2021
Shortlisted for the US National Book Award for Fiction 2020
'Douglas Stuart has written a first novel of rare and lasting beauty' – Observer
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, 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. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother’s sense of snobbish propriety. The miners' children pick on him and adults condemn him as 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.
Douglas Stuart's Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride. A counterpart to the privileged Thatcher-era London of Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty, it also recalls the work of Édouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, a blistering debut by a brilliant writer with a powerful and important story to tell.
'We were bowled over by this first novel, which creates an amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love.' – The judges of the Booker Prize
- Print length430 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPicador
- Publication dateAugust 6, 2020
- Reading age18 years and up
- Dimensions6.42 x 1.77 x 9.49 inches
- ISBN-101529019273
- ISBN-13978-1529019278
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Product details
- Publisher : Picador; Main Market edition (August 6, 2020)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 430 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1529019273
- ISBN-13 : 978-1529019278
- Reading age : 18 years and up
- Item Weight : 2.31 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.42 x 1.77 x 9.49 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #120,822 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #158 in LGBTQ+ Literary Fiction (Books)
- #1,873 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #8,185 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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Shuggie Bain: A Novel
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About the author
Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American writer. He is the author of two novels, Young Mungo, and, Shuggie Bain.
His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, won the 2020 Booker Prize. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction. It won the Book of The Year at the British Book Awards and The Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was also a finalist for the Rathbones Folio Prize, The Kirkus Prize, The Orwell Prize, The Pen Hemingway Award, The McKitterick Prize and was a finalist for The Center for Fiction First novel prize.
Young Mungo was a Sunday Times #1 Bestseller. His work has been translated into 39 languages.
His short stories, Found Wanting, and, The Englishman, were published in The New Yorker magazine. His essays on gender, anxiety, and poverty can be found on Lit Hub.
Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he is a graduate of The Royal College of Art, and since 2000 he has lived and worked in New York City. Prior to being published, he worked for over twenty years as a fashion designer.
https://www.douglasdstuart.com
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Neighbors gossip and teachers fret, but really, “no one sees the flying woman.” Everyone leaves her: Agnes’ husbands and lovers, her daughter, her son. But Shuggie sees her. He’ll never leave. “I’d do anything for you,” he tells Agnes, when she trades buying him food for more of her drink.
After one too many lagers unravels Agnes’ life like the “toe to waist” run in her Pretty Pollys, though, Shuggie—having devoted his school days to buying her lager with food money, putting her to bed, and believing her promises to “give up the drink” and “get a job like other mammies”—wonders, “Why can’t I be enough?”
Every child of an alcoholic has asked herself that question. And if anything were ever enough to pull a parent from alcoholism, it would Shuggie—a selfless, earnest, honest, boy whose optimism is exceptionally buoyant. Shuggie is nothing if not wholly dedicated to Agnes’ happiness, her survival. But then, every child of an alcoholic knows that even the most perfect daughter or son is no cure for the urge to drink. Anyone who’s watched their parent stumble through the door, slur meaningless yet wicked insults, reach for another drink while their child goes hungry in belly and soul knows they aren’t as important as the next bottle or can, who takes off their parent’s shoes mid-day and tucks them into bed—these readers will weep.
And, at Shuggie’s side, like the coins he feeds and robs and feeds the electric meter, they’ll believe the promises to quit, hold out hope the AA will keep them clean, be the parent till the parent can gets back on his or her feet. The reader flinches at the blatant truths, and at the ‘skills’ with which Shuggie ‘survives’ ten years in the “new economy of the scheme”—the Eighties. Starved, neglected, abused, molested, and isolated, Shuggie wears his suffering on his jumper. But also, he knows Agnes doesn’t want to live like this.
Stylistically, the omniscient narrator uses heavy metaphor to put images into context young Shuggie can understand. Every “like” and “as” at once clarifies otherwise ungraspable, while distancing Shuggie from reality. From the opening line—“The day was flat,” throughout the central “limpet” theme, onto the conclusion, where, “like a tugboat,” Shuggie nudges his friend’s shoulder, metaphor gives Shuggie a lens through which he can understand his world. And it is his world. Time is measured by plastic ponies and little green men.
Stuart’s portrait—equally Shuggie’s and Agnes’—is imperfect. It’s sometimes rugged, always raw. But an exceptionally tight, polished tale wouldn’t make any sense. Readers who know the drink firsthand can relate. And those who are fortunate not to know the drink, they will forever see alcoholism differently. This is a story of empathy.
One reader sent me an email saying that he couldn't attend the discussion because it was too sad and disturbing, and a few of the attendees said that they were having a hard time finishing it because of the subject matter. But even those who had a hard time with the content thought that it was very well written and deserved the 2020 Booker Award.
A few readers also had problems with the dialect and Scottish slang. We decoded a few terms determining that "messages" are errands, "jankey" is run-down and undesirable, "jakey" is an old homeless alcoholic, and "papped" is beat down. Even the slang in the novel is sad and depressing.
Each chapter is a standalone story that advances the fall of Shuggie and/or his alcoholic mother Agnes. The depiction of co-dependency and alcoholism is accurate, thorough, and sad.
One of the most common criticisms was that the novel should have been called "Agnes Bain" since it was more about her than Shuggie. I think that the novel was largely told from Shuggie's point of view, even if some of the chapters include information that only Agnes could have known. She would have told Shuggie these stories, at some point. There was also a criticism that (especially for a queer group), there wasn't enough gay content for Shuggie, but Shuggie is very young, pre-pubescent, and he's clearly an outsider in a number of ways, including his sexuality. And the two incidents where he's abused (by Bonny Johnny and the cab driver) are enough.
The other common criticism was that the novel was too long. Some of the stories don't especially contribute to the Agnes-and-Shuggie narrative (such as Catherine’s attack and near-rape, and Leek's misadventure while stealing copper) and only contribute to the feeling of "poverty porn" in the novel.
There was also a complaint that some of the stories seem to be "gilding the lily." (What's the opposite of this? "Soiling the lily" or "fouling the compost heap"?) Shuggie's stories seem integral and make him seem heroic at times. A few of Agnes' stories (such as her throwing a trash can through the window and hiding under the coats after her attack at the New Year's Eve party) seem contrived and unconvincing. On the other hand, the story of Agnes and the now-sober garage attendant, who quickly and accurately identifies Agnes as a fellow drinker looking to hock her coat, rings very true. Outside her year in AA, Agnes' story is an endless horror show, and we can debate how many times this has to be repeated.
Having said that, there is some joy and humor in the story: Agnes and Shuggie steal flowers for their garden, Eugene takes Agnes to a Wild West-themed club, Shuggie makes friends and helps a girl with a similarly alcoholic mother, and some exchanges with Agnes' drunken girlfriend Jinty are very funny (including "You know there is a big difference between enjoying a quiet drink and selling yourself for a prescription, don't ye think?")
The novel "The End of Eddy" by Edouard Louis, which we read a few years ago, contains a similar amount of violence and homophobia, but in France. In US culture, the first two-thirds of the movie "Moonlight" suggest a "Shuggie Bain" level of poverty, but in Miami and with drugs rather than alcohol.
We generally agreed that this is a sometimes tough but definitely worthy read. We're looking forward to reading Stuart's follow-up novel "Young Mungo," a gay love story, which is also getting great reviews.
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Shuggie também tem suas próprias questões. Um menino frágil, ele sofre bulling o tempo todo na escola, na rua, em casa. Ele também sente atração por outros meninos, mas não compreende isso, e, obviamente, não sabe lidar com isso. Quando a irmão e o irmão mais velhos saem de casa (são filhos do primeiro casamento da mãe) caberá ao menino cuidar da mãe cada vez mais deprimida.
Primeiro romance de Douglas Stuart, poderia facilmente cair na exploração de uma infância no inferno, mas o autor é sóbrio em seu retrato da working class de Glasgow dos anos de 1980. Não há redenção fácil – se é que há –, e Shuggie descobre isso a duras penas. A sobriedade da linguagem e da narrativa não fazem deste um romance duro e frio, pelo contrário. O autor tem um enorme carinho pelo seu protagonista – por todas personagens, na verdade -, e traz nuances a ele, e a quem o cerca. Ninguém é exclusivamente bom ou mal, vítima ou perpetrador.