The Book Club: Shuggie Bain

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4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2020

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Sam's guest on this week's Book Club podcast is the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, Douglas Stuart. His first novel, Shuggie Bain, tells the story of a boy growing up in poverty in 1980s Glasgow with an alcoholic single mother. It's a story close to the author's own. He joins Sam from the States to tell him about the ten years he spent writing the book and the dozens of rejections he had from publishers, how moving to the States made him see Glasgow more clearly - and how he went from growing up in a house without books to winning the Booker prize for his first novel.

The Book Club is a series of literary interviews and discussions on the latest releases in the world of publishing, from poetry through to physics. Presented by Sam Leith, The Spectator's Literary Editor. Hear past episodes here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Spectator magazine combines incisive political analysis with books and arts reviews of unrivaled authority. Absolutely free. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher.
0:28.9	Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary
0:33.5	ed for The Spectator and I'm very pleased to be joined this week by Douglas Stewart,
0:38.2	who has just won the Booker Prize for his first novel, quite an achievement, which is called
0:43.4	Shuggy Bain, and tells the story of a little boy growing up in 1980s, Glasgow and his relationship
0:50.5	with, well, I guess three generations of his own family, including his own.
0:55.1	Douglas, welcome. Tell us a bit about Shuggy in his world, if you could.
0:58.8	Oh, certainly. Thanks for having me, Sam. Well, Shuggie's world is certainly a world of loss and of
1:05.2	complication. The book focuses on a very intimate story between Shuggie, who is the youngest of three children and his mother,
1:13.1	Agnes Bain, who is a beautiful, defiant, generous, funny, resilient, Glaswegean housewife.
1:21.3	Agnes has married across sectarian lines, and her husband is actually philandering his way
1:27.2	across the city.
1:28.1	Flandering's too nice of a word for what he does,
1:30.7	but he is treating women appallingly across the city and cheating on Agnes.
1:35.4	When Agnes believes that he is moving her and their children to a new home,
1:40.8	he uses that opportunity to abandon her
1:43.1	and her three children in a North Lanarkshire
1:45.8	mining town that is being shut down by the Thatcher government. After Agnes's abandoned, she
1:50.6	starts to descend into addiction and to hopelessness and it is really a look at how her three
1:56.3	children react to that, how they stay by their mother's side and try to save their mother from
2:00.6	herself. It is Shuggy, the youngest, by their mother's side and try to save their mother from herself.
2:01.6	It is Shuggy, the youngest, who stays by her side the longest. But while his mother is
	...

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