First published 2021
Hugh "Shuggie" Bain lives with his mother Agnes in crumbling public housing in 1980s Glasgow. Agnes dreams of better things as she flips through mail-order catalogs, buying small luxuries on credit to brighten her bleak world. She maintains her appearance with careful makeup, a towering beehive, and white false teeth that give her the glamour of a working-class Elizabeth Taylor. But Agnes drinks away most of the family's weekly benefits on strong lager that she hides in handbags and pours into tea cups. Her older children escape when they can, leaving sensitive young Shuggie alone to tend to his mother through her cycles of drunkenness and brief sobriety. Shuggie struggles to fit in as a boy others see as different, carrying a secret that everyone but him seems to recognize. Agnes loves her youngest son fiercely, yet her addiction consumes everything in its path. As unemployment ravages their Glasgow neighborhood and drugs lurk nearby, Shuggie faces an impossible choice between caring for the mother who is both his anchor and his burden.
Genres: literary-fiction, addiction, contemporary, family-drama
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Glasgow, Scotland
Period: 1980s
480 pages · Paperback · Picador
Content warnings: addiction, alcohol-abuse, child-abuse