Shuggie Bain

Douglas Stuart 2020

Devastation Rating

Existential Dread
poverty addiction family grief literary fiction loss

Our Take

Shuggie loves his mother and his mother is an alcoholic and Glasgow in the 1980s is a city being hollowed out. Stuart writes poverty and addiction and a boy's devotion with no distance whatsoever. Agnes Bain is one of the most devastating characters in contemporary fiction — beautiful, destructive, and impossible to leave.

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