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    Shuggie Bain

    £11.99
    £14.99
    Price-Match is available in-store for recommended titles in CCCU module handbooks
    ISBN: 9781529019278
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    Attribute nameAttribute value
    AuthorStuart, Douglas
    Pub Date06/08/2020
    BindingHardback
    Pages448
    Publisher: Pan Macmillan
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    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 is fierce and loving and lovely. He shows us lots of monstrous behavior, but not a single monster . . . His book leaves us gutted and marveling' New York Times

    An Observer 'Best Debut Novelist of 2020'

    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 mother's 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 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, a blistering debut by a brilliant writer with a powerful and important story to tell.

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