Shuggie Bain is the debut novel by Scottish-American writer Douglas Stuart, published in 2020. It tells the story of the youngest of the three children, Shuggie, growing up with his alcoholic mother, Agnes, in the 1980s, in a post-industrial working-class Glasgow, Scotland.

The novel was awarded the 2020 Booker Prize, making Stuart the second Scottish winner of the prize in its 51-year history, following James Kelman in 1994. Shuggie Bain was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction.

The scene begins with 39-year-old Agnes Bain dancing with her five-year-old son (the eponymous Shuggie) in the Glasgow tenement flat they share with her parents, her two teenage children, and her philandering husband. “When she laughed, he danced harder… The happier she looked, the harder he wanted to spin and flail… Agnes threw her head back in peals of laughter, and the sadness was gone from her eyes.”

They are “breathless from laughing” when they hear the heavy tread of Shuggie’s father, Big Shug, who has stopped by for a cup of tea during a break from driving his taxi. In an instant, the atmosphere changes, “as though it was not Shug but the cold Campsie wind itself that had arrived.” Agnes hides the empty lager cans that litter the room and lights a cigarette. She sings along to a lugubrious song, “ her voice with the poor me’s,” as she quite deliberately sets the cheap polyester curtains on fire.

As the room burns, mother and son cling to each other: “together they watched all this new beauty in silence.” Readers too will frequently find themselves contemplating all this beauty as the novel burns around them, as the lives of Agnes and Shuggie seem always on the brink of being reduced to cinders and ash.

A similar atmosphere of dreadful suspense — as if any moment one can go from dancing deliriously to setting one’s house on fire — pervades Real Life, Brandon Taylor’s Booker-shortlisted debut novel.

Occasionally, Shuggie Bain, with its sentimentality and overwhelming squalor, can veer close to self-parody but is always pulled back from the brink by its enormous heart, by the enormous love that binds Shuggie to Agnes. Real Life is more enigmatic. Aptly for a novel in which water is practically a character, it is murky, slippery, its depths easy to underestimate.