Shuggie Bain – Book Club @ Leitrim Daily: June 2021

Leitrim Daily

The Book Club @ Leitrim Daily is in session for June 2021. Our Book Club panel met once again to share their thoughts on their latest selection, the multiple award winning debut novel from Douglas Stuart, ’Shuggie Bain’.

The club’s host Mary Blake is joined by retired librarian Hilda King, Orlagh Kelly of The Reading Room Bookshop in Carrick on Shannon and Michael Geoghegan to work their way through this first full length novel from the winner of The Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award.

This will be the last episode of the Book Club for this season as the panel take a summer break.

You can get all books covered in the series from The Reading Room Bookshop in Carrick on Shannon. Contact Orlagh at 071 9671580. You’ll even get 10% off the book when you mention the Book Club @ Leitrim Daily.

About ‘Shuggie Bain' by Douglas Stuart.

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 Édouard Louis, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, a blistering debut by a brilliant writer with a powerful and important story to tell.