Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
The fascinating tale of young Hugh “Shuggie” Bain, a kind and lonely youngster who spent his boyhood in dilapidated public housing in Glasgow, Scotland, during the 1980s, is called Shuggie Bain. The famed drug epidemic in the city is waiting in the wings, and Thatcher’s policies have rendered sons and husbands jobless.
Agnes, Shuggie’s mother, travels a perilous path; while she is Shuggie’s compass, she also weighs heavily on him and his siblings. She flips through Freeman’s catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit—anything to make her life less gloomy—while daydreaming about a home with a front door of her own.
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
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Agnes maintains her pride while being married to a philandering taxi driver by maintaining a stylish appearance. Her hairdo, makeup, and white artificial teeth give her the glitzy appearance of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. However, behind the surface, Agnes is finding more and more solace in alcohol, and she spends the majority of each week’s benefits—all the family has to live on—on extra-strong beer cans that are concealed in handbags and poured into tea mugs. Agnes’s elder children separate themselves from their mother in their own ways, leaving Shuggie to take care of her while she alternates between drinking binges and sobriety.
In the meantime, Shuggie is attempting valiantly to transform into the typical boy he so desperately wants to be, but everyone has noticed that he is “no right,” a boy with a secret that everyone but him can see. Although Agnes supports her son, her addiction has the potential to overshadow everyone in her life, including her beloved Shuggie.
Shuggie Bain is an epic picture of a working-class family that is infrequently seen in fiction. It is a devastating tale of addiction, sexuality, and love. It is a superb debut novel by a writer with a compelling and significant story to tell, evoking the works of Édouard Louis, Alan Hollinghurst, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara.
This is the tale of the stunning and glitzy Agnes Bain, who was also a mother, wife, lover, friend, and, most importantly, an alcoholic. It takes place in the 1980s, when the coal mines collapsed and there was a severe unemployment problem, in the slums of Glasgow, Scotland, a mining town that is practically deserted. Agnes is married to taxi driver Hugh “Shug” Bain, and the two of them share a small Glasgow public housing apartment with her parents, her teenage children from her first marriage, Catherine and Leek, and 5-year-old Shuggie, who gradually comes to terms with the fact that he is different from other boys as he gets older. Agnes is an alcoholic, and as the years pass, her drinking causes harm to not only her but also to those in her immediate vicinity.
