Synopsis
Winner of the Booker Prize 2020
Shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction 2020
An Observer ‘Best Debut Novelist of 2020’
‘An amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love’ - The judges of the Booker Prize
It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of...
Details
12 November 2020448 pages
9781529064414Imprint: Picador
Reviews
Beautiful and bleak but with enough warmth and optimism to carry the reader through.Graham Norton (via Twitter)
A boy's heartbreaking love for his mother . . . as intense and excruciating to read as any novel I have ever held in my hand . . . The book’s evocative power arises out of the author’s talent for conjuring a place, a time, and the texture of emotion . . . brilliantly written.Newsday
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
This heartfelt and harrowing debut novel – which has been compared to the work of Édouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, and which Kirkus has already called “a masterpiece” . . . is rightly being heralded for its visceral, emotionally nuanced portrayal of working class Scottish life and its blazingly intimate exploration of a mother-son relationship.LitHub
