WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD 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.

First things first. Stuart can write beautifully and with honesty. While we had a lot of different takes on this book in our group, the one thing we kept coming back to, and the thing that made the lowest review in the group pretty good and the highest amazing, was that Stuart created very believeble and very compelling scenes and characters. In many ways, this is a novel about how addiction, particularly alcoholism, destroys people, but to Stuart, that's a very specific addiction to very specific people. Agnes, the mother of Shuggie, is just an incredibly well-rendered character -- complex, admirable in ways, frustrating, and human. The fact that we kept hoping for the best for Agnes despite her failures and that we keep taking her side despite her horrible acts of selfishness is testament to how vividly Stuart created that character. This vividness is all over the novel -- in Shug (Shuggie's dad) and his new family, in the community that Agnes moves to in both the houses and the tenement, in the arc of Agnes's relationship with Eugene, in Shuggie's friendship with Leanne. A lot of our conversation looked at the different children's reactions to Agnes and asked about the ethics of support. Was Leek's statement that Shuggie had to save himself true or selfish? Could we see Shuggie's extreme attempts to help his mother in her worst state enabling or noble? A lot of us defended Catherine's decision to leave and came to the conclusion that the children were just doing what they had to in order to survive. This highlighted another of the strengths of the novel. Stuart has a very interesting take on perspective. The book orbits around Agnes and Shuggie, and when other characters are in their lives (e.g. Shug, Leek, Catherine) we get a sense of their interiority, but when they leave the central orbit, they disappear completely. This is a wonderful convention, giving Stuart the ability let us understand Eugene's disgusted at the 'broken' people at AA or the danger Catherine is in of sexual violence that onl curbed by giving the right answer to a question of allegience, but then making those characters unknowable when they no longer inhabit Shuggie's life very beautifully reflects the protagonists' ignorance of their lives and distance from them. None of us would argue that the book didn't succeed masterfully at these levels. The issues with the book were twofold. About half the book had problems with the plot. Some of the choices Stuart made were just transparent meant to tug the heart strings, and the novel didn't need them to make us empathize. Really, did Leek have to be a great artist accepted into art school only to give it up because of his family? Would we have felt he was less disadvantaged if we didn't have that obvious plot twist? Really did Eugene have to be the one to throw Agnes off sobriety? Is that a bit pat as an AA story? Many of us weren't bothered by these decisions, but some of us felt that Stuart just wanted to beat us with sadness in every sentence, and that the story would have been better if he had just trusted the power of the rest with such easy gimmicks. The other issue is that the novel is very raw. Many NUBClubbers, particularly those who had been exposed to relatives with alcoholism, found the book so real as to be almost unreadable. We did a second vote to see how many people thought the novel was very fun and how many liked reading it, and that was very telling about how few of us would recommend the novel to anyone given how emotionally hard it was. Still, we ended on going back to the scenes, highlighting the moment when Shuggie is dancing for Agnes and is seen by the other children, who will mock him for being gay. Agnes encourages to keep dancing anyway, and we noted how the novel also ends with Shuggie dancing, getting a moment of joy in an impoverished and painful life. The power of that image is what Stuart absolutely nails throughout the novel, and as hard as it is to absorb, Shuggie Bain is a deserving Man Booker winner, and an incredibly potent depiction of pain, weakness, and the ways we find joy and perserverance within them.