Shuggie Bain

Cover Type: Softcover
Book Condition: Fine
Jacket Condition: None Issued
Publisher: Picador
Publisher Place: London
Publisher Year: 2021
Edition: Reprint

Description: 430 pages. Book appears to have hardly been read and is in Fine condition throughout.

Publishers Description: A heart-wrenchingly moving first novel set in Glasgow during the Thatcher years, Shuggie Bain tells the story of a boys doomed attempt to save his proud, alcoholic mother from her addiction. 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 mothers 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 Stuarts 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 Hollinghursts 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.

ISBN: 9781529019292