If the dark and drear is to your taste, here is a great wallow. By page 73, life was too short for this dystopia.

This is the bleak and harrowing story of Shuggie, his two older siblings, and his mother Agnes. Agnes is a beautiful and proud woman, and a horrific alcoholic. Very dark and gritty, but there is so much love and humanity under the grim layers. Truly devastating, brutally authentic, and an astonishing debut.

"This richly told coming-of-age story, set in the deprived Glasgow of the 1980s, won this year’s Booker prize. Though the title character charms with his humorous sideways look at the world, the emotional centre of the book is his “disintegrating mother,” Agnes, whose high hopes are tragically derailed by alcoholism." (Economist Books of the Year 2020)

This won the prestigious Booker Award today! CONGRATS!

The poignant and colourful tale of a family's struggle to survive their mother's alcoholism in nineteen-eighties Glasgow. Full of humor and hunger - for food, booze and love. Winner of the 2020 Booker Prize!

The Heart's Invisible Furies meets Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland meets A Little Life in Douglas Stuart's prize-listed debut novel. This book felt like a rainy Glasgow day, a damp that will never lift.

Like another Goodreads reviewer stated, it would make more sense for this book to be titled Agnes Bain. Yes, we observe Agnes's destructive behavior through the lens of her son Shuggie's dysfunctional and undernourished childhood. But more than that, we learn of Agnes's empty relationships, constant temptations, and crippling loneliness that fuels her addiction.

A debut in a class by itself and a must-read.

Shuggie's (=Stuart's) story reminds me in some ways of Ignatius J. Reilly in The Confederacy of Dunces. Of course is in his 30s, and wee Shuggie is still small, but their voices are at once funny and heartbreaking. And both are compassionate sons who find themselves trapped.

Wanting to read more of Douglas Stuart, I read his "Found Wanting" in The New Yorker: This short story is also about a young gay man (similar to Shuggie, but a bit older) who has not yet come out, but who nevertheless is trying to find love in the closeted Glasgow of the 80s. To me, this story was very unremarkable. Both "Found Wanting" and Shuggie Bain are autobiographical fiction; one, a "sketch" (in the author's words), the other, a longer study. But sketches can be remarkable pieces of art, and the the short work does not light a candle to the (uniformly) outstanding execution in Shuggie Bain.

Stuart, a true storyteller, shares the life of a struggling Glasgow family ripe with struggles of alcoholism, poverty, and identity. Its told through the eyes of an innocent child torn between what is true and loyalty to family, It's deep, sad, and endearing. The story wraps around you and carries you to the end.

Agnes Bain may be the most memorable drunk in literature. Living in Glasgow Scotland during the 1980’s, she leaves her first husband who seems to be a solid, respectable person with whom she had two children. She leaves him for a philandering taxi driver whose activities aren’t that much different than hers. With Shug Bain she has a third child, Shuggie. Shug moves the family from his mother-in-law’s apartment to god-forsaken council housing in an area where Maggie Thatcher has been closing the coal mines. Shug leaves Agnes and the three kids there and returns to Glasgow where he shacks up with his mistress. You really can’t blame him, Agnes is soused most of the time. The two older kids are nearly adult and manage to make their way forward, but poor little Shuggie, is stuck with his mom, the mean kids in the council housing who instantly pick up on his feminine ways and pick on him continually. Worth reading, this is one of the saddest books I’ve read in a long time. Glasgow has lost its appeal after reading about their slums. This is not a book that makes you want to visit. If you want a cheerful middle-class book about Scotland read something by Alexander McCall Smith, although it seems like the residents around 44 Scotland Street in Edinburgh aren’t that impressed by Glasgow either.