Shuggie Bain

A heart-wrenchingly moving first novel set in Glasgow during the Thatcher years, Shuggie Bain tells the story of a boy's doomed attempt to save his proud, alcoholic mother from her addiction.

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 Edouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist with a powerful and important story to tell.

Shuggie Bain is an intimate and frighteningly acute exploration of a mother-son relationship and a masterful portrait of alcoholism in Scottish working class life, rendered with old-school lyrical realism . . . I kept being reminded of Joyce's Dubliners.

Auteur

Douglas Stuart was born and raised in Glasgow. After graduating from the Royal College of Art, he moved to New York, where he began a career in design. Shuggie Bain is his debut novel. It has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, the Kirkus Prize and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. It has also been longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. His short stories have appeared in the New Yorker and his essay on Gender, Anxiety and Class was published by Lit Hub.

Texte du rabat

'Beautiful and bleak but with enough warmth and optimism to carry the reader through.' Graham Norton (on Twitter)

'A debut novel that reads like a masterpiece, Shuggie Bain gives voice to the kind of helpless, hopeless love that children can feel toward broken parents.' Washington Post

'[Shuggie Bain] would be just about unbearable were it not for the author's astonishing capacity for love . . . The book leaves us gutted and marveling: Life may be short, but it takes forever.' New York Times

'A boy's heartbreaking love for his mother . . . as intense and excruciating to read as any novel I have ever held in my hand . . . brilliantly written.' Newsday

'A formidable story, lyrically told, about intimacy, family, and love.' ELLE (US)