--- product_id: 230879670 title: "Shuggie Bain: The Million-Copy Bestseller & Winner of the Booker Prize" price: "21906CFA" currency: XOF in_stock: true reviews_count: 13 url: https://www.desertcart.sn/products/230879670-shuggie-bain-the-million-copy-bestseller-and-winner-of-booker store_origin: SN region: Senegal --- # Set in 1980s Glasgow Booker Prize Winner Million-Copy Bestseller Shuggie Bain: The Million-Copy Bestseller & Winner of the Booker Prize **Price:** 21906CFA **Availability:** ✅ In Stock ## Summary > 📖 Dive into the Booker Prize-winning story everyone’s talking about — don’t miss out on this literary phenomenon! ## Quick Answers - **What is this?** Shuggie Bain: The Million-Copy Bestseller & Winner of the Booker Prize - **How much does it cost?** 21906CFA with free shipping - **Is it available?** Yes, in stock and ready to ship - **Where can I buy it?** [www.desertcart.sn](https://www.desertcart.sn/products/230879670-shuggie-bain-the-million-copy-bestseller-and-winner-of-booker) ## Best For - Customers looking for quality international products ## Why This Product - Free international shipping included - Worldwide delivery with tracking - 15-day hassle-free returns ## Key Features - • **Bestseller with Impact:** Over a million copies sold worldwide, resonating deeply with fans of literary fiction and social realism. - • **Award-Winning Masterpiece:** Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize and multiple British Book Awards, a must-have for discerning readers. - • **Authentic Grit & Compassion:** A raw, intimate portrayal of addiction, poverty, and resilience set against Thatcher-era Glasgow’s harsh realities. - • **Critically Acclaimed Narrative:** Praised by The Observer, The Times, and even Dua Lipa for its powerful storytelling and emotional depth. - • **Culturally Relevant & Timeless:** Explores themes of family, identity, and societal neglect that continue to spark conversation among millennials and professionals. ## Overview Shuggie Bain is a Booker Prize-winning novel and million-copy bestseller that delivers a heart-wrenching, compassionate portrait of a boy’s struggle to save his alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow. Celebrated for its raw depiction of poverty, addiction, and love, this critically acclaimed work has become a cultural touchstone for readers seeking powerful, socially conscious literature. ## Description Winner of the Booker Prize Winner of 'Book of the Year' and 'Debut of the Year' at the British Book Awards The Million-Copy Bestseller A heart-wrenchingly moving 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. 'An amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love.' – The judges of the Booker Prize ' Shuggie Bain means so much to me. It is such a powerfully written story . . . I love a heartbreak book but there is so much love within this one, particularly between Shuggie and his mother' – Dua Lipa It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life, dreaming of greater things. But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and as she descends deeper into drink, her 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, he is clearly 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. Shuggie Bain lays bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride. For readers of A Little Life and Angela's Ashes , it is a heartbreaking novel by a brilliant writer with a powerful and important story to tell. 'Douglas Stuart has written a first novel of rare and lasting beauty.' – The Observer 'A heartbreaking novel.' – The Times 'Tender and unsentimental . . . The Billy Elliot-ish character of Shuggie . . . leaps off the page.' – Daily Mail Review: Heart wrenching, shocking, dreadful but also filled with love, humour and resilience. - I resisted reading this for the longest time, as I mistakenly thought Stuart’s Booker prize winner would be in the same ball-park as another, earlier Booker prize winner inhabiting the same ball-park of family breakdown and the devastating effects of alcoholism, which I found was unremitting and unvarying in its laying out of the destruction and degradation which inhabits the world of addiction. What elevates Shuggie Bain for me, even though Stuart pulls no punches, is the absolute love shown between Agnes and her children. Love which of course is often crashed and smashed and eviscerated bu drink. Stuart writes from the place of compassion and love – and also, from a place of healthy societal awareness and rage. The real villain here is far far wider than an individual. Rather, the legacy of Thatcher’s ‘there’s no such thing as society’ Britain. That mind-set of self-interest, survival of the fittest, class war, people as expendable, union-bashing. Stuart lays clear the fall out for communities where their industries have gone. Communities which had formed around mining, The legacy of the 1980’s, the creation of new towns, haphazardly and cheaply done. Shuggie Bain is a novel, but it comes formed by Stuart’s own life. A gifted boy, child of a mother who struggled with alcoholism, a boy discovering himself as gay, one with an older brother and sister. The foundation of this book – and clearly, the heart and love within difficult family relationships, are Stuart’s own, though specific characters and events are the novelist’s craft: this is not an autobiography or straight ‘memoir’ It is also, despite (or perhaps because of) the harrowing, at times joyous, feisty, and full of life. Stuart works to awaken the compassionate and tender heart in his readers, to feel WITH his characters in their weighty struggles, not to despise or dismiss them. Review: The Grit Of Poverty. - This superb story is essentially in three parts. In the first and final parts we encounter Shuggie after he has physically escaped the events of the lengthy middle portion. I thought the first part was too long and caused a wrench when the book stepped back ten years, moving into the second section, taking Shuggie back to his childhood, especially as the reader really needed some knowledge of the main events in order to process this first section. This is a minor complaint; the author picks us up and carries us along once we meet Shuggie's family. The bulk of the main story concerns Shuggie's mother, Agnes, an alcoholic struggling - and struggling is the word - to control her alcoholism, bring up three children, experience some sort of life, realise her hopes and ambitions, and negotiate the people around her. Her love for her kids is manifest but she and they are doomed by drink, feckless lovers, vicious neighbours and an absence of any true friends. She meets a man she likes but even he - actually one of the more decent characters - betrays her in the most convincing and destructive manner. Agnes herself is superbly drawn - her alcoholism-cycle of drink, stupor, guilt, drink again, and her changes in character from sweet and loving, through drunken rage and spite to hungover regret are utterly true to life: one alcoholic possesses several conflicting personalities. The author has set the novel in eighties Scotland and hints at the damage done by Margaret Thatcher's government to Agnes' neighbourhood, employment prospects and class, but doesn't ram Thatcher down the reader's throat. This is just as well because it is one component of the social environment in which Shuggie's family try to live. Agnes' ambitions to rise out of her poverty and degradation are thwarted time and again by her alcoholism, uncaring - even absent- local and national governments, and by a cold society isolating and degrading her and her family. Logically, this vile environment did not just spring up with the new government; it had been festering for years. Agnes didn't have a chance. In the middle of this mess we find Shuggie, a decent, seemingly doomed boy striving to cope with and care for his loving but incapable and deteriorating mother as well as negotiate both his emerging sexuality and the pitfalls of simply growing up. The warmth of his mother, and her guilt over his plight, the convincingly well masked affection of his brother, are clearly drawn in description as well as appropriately gritty language. I felt I was listening to the authentic voice of deprived and struggling Glaswegians. The landscape and emotional life of the book are stark and bleak but the superb quality of the prose carries the reader through to the final section. This is a narrative novel not a trite story with a message. It does, I think, have a kernel of redemptive seed to it. Three quarters through, Shuggie goes to cash a benefit book for his mother. The regulation-spouting cashier considers refusing to oblige but eventually pays up when the queue becomes impatient. As she does so, she dispenses a few words of wisdom representing the only real hope Shuggie ,or any of us, really has. It's a crucial scene, all the more poignant because the cashier - however distantly - represents callous officialdom. Towards the end there is a tragicomic development when an acquaintance invites Shuggie along to makeup numbers on a date (of sorts!) A beam of hope under a louring Glasgow sky. Is the hope realised? I won't spoil it. Shuggie Bain deserves its place in the short list. I wish it well for the award. ## Features - New Store Stock ## Technical Specifications | Specification | Value | |---------------|-------| | Best Sellers Rank | 2,003 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) 8 in Drug & Chemical Abuse Addiction & Recovery 148 in Literary Fiction (Books) 230 in Contemporary Fiction (Books) | | Customer Reviews | 4.5 out of 5 stars 51,816 Reviews | ## Images ![Shuggie Bain: The Million-Copy Bestseller & Winner of the Booker Prize - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81YrOSRf16S.jpg) ## Customer Reviews ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Heart wrenching, shocking, dreadful but also filled with love, humour and resilience. *by L***L on 16 November 2024* I resisted reading this for the longest time, as I mistakenly thought Stuart’s Booker prize winner would be in the same ball-park as another, earlier Booker prize winner inhabiting the same ball-park of family breakdown and the devastating effects of alcoholism, which I found was unremitting and unvarying in its laying out of the destruction and degradation which inhabits the world of addiction. What elevates Shuggie Bain for me, even though Stuart pulls no punches, is the absolute love shown between Agnes and her children. Love which of course is often crashed and smashed and eviscerated bu drink. Stuart writes from the place of compassion and love – and also, from a place of healthy societal awareness and rage. The real villain here is far far wider than an individual. Rather, the legacy of Thatcher’s ‘there’s no such thing as society’ Britain. That mind-set of self-interest, survival of the fittest, class war, people as expendable, union-bashing. Stuart lays clear the fall out for communities where their industries have gone. Communities which had formed around mining, The legacy of the 1980’s, the creation of new towns, haphazardly and cheaply done. Shuggie Bain is a novel, but it comes formed by Stuart’s own life. A gifted boy, child of a mother who struggled with alcoholism, a boy discovering himself as gay, one with an older brother and sister. The foundation of this book – and clearly, the heart and love within difficult family relationships, are Stuart’s own, though specific characters and events are the novelist’s craft: this is not an autobiography or straight ‘memoir’ It is also, despite (or perhaps because of) the harrowing, at times joyous, feisty, and full of life. Stuart works to awaken the compassionate and tender heart in his readers, to feel WITH his characters in their weighty struggles, not to despise or dismiss them. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ The Grit Of Poverty. *by S***E on 22 September 2020* This superb story is essentially in three parts. In the first and final parts we encounter Shuggie after he has physically escaped the events of the lengthy middle portion. I thought the first part was too long and caused a wrench when the book stepped back ten years, moving into the second section, taking Shuggie back to his childhood, especially as the reader really needed some knowledge of the main events in order to process this first section. This is a minor complaint; the author picks us up and carries us along once we meet Shuggie's family. The bulk of the main story concerns Shuggie's mother, Agnes, an alcoholic struggling - and struggling is the word - to control her alcoholism, bring up three children, experience some sort of life, realise her hopes and ambitions, and negotiate the people around her. Her love for her kids is manifest but she and they are doomed by drink, feckless lovers, vicious neighbours and an absence of any true friends. She meets a man she likes but even he - actually one of the more decent characters - betrays her in the most convincing and destructive manner. Agnes herself is superbly drawn - her alcoholism-cycle of drink, stupor, guilt, drink again, and her changes in character from sweet and loving, through drunken rage and spite to hungover regret are utterly true to life: one alcoholic possesses several conflicting personalities. The author has set the novel in eighties Scotland and hints at the damage done by Margaret Thatcher's government to Agnes' neighbourhood, employment prospects and class, but doesn't ram Thatcher down the reader's throat. This is just as well because it is one component of the social environment in which Shuggie's family try to live. Agnes' ambitions to rise out of her poverty and degradation are thwarted time and again by her alcoholism, uncaring - even absent- local and national governments, and by a cold society isolating and degrading her and her family. Logically, this vile environment did not just spring up with the new government; it had been festering for years. Agnes didn't have a chance. In the middle of this mess we find Shuggie, a decent, seemingly doomed boy striving to cope with and care for his loving but incapable and deteriorating mother as well as negotiate both his emerging sexuality and the pitfalls of simply growing up. The warmth of his mother, and her guilt over his plight, the convincingly well masked affection of his brother, are clearly drawn in description as well as appropriately gritty language. I felt I was listening to the authentic voice of deprived and struggling Glaswegians. The landscape and emotional life of the book are stark and bleak but the superb quality of the prose carries the reader through to the final section. This is a narrative novel not a trite story with a message. It does, I think, have a kernel of redemptive seed to it. Three quarters through, Shuggie goes to cash a benefit book for his mother. The regulation-spouting cashier considers refusing to oblige but eventually pays up when the queue becomes impatient. As she does so, she dispenses a few words of wisdom representing the only real hope Shuggie ,or any of us, really has. It's a crucial scene, all the more poignant because the cashier - however distantly - represents callous officialdom. Towards the end there is a tragicomic development when an acquaintance invites Shuggie along to makeup numbers on a date (of sorts!) A beam of hope under a louring Glasgow sky. Is the hope realised? I won't spoil it. Shuggie Bain deserves its place in the short list. I wish it well for the award. ### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Tragic, well written, worth reading BUT with a few reservations... *by A***T on 25 October 2020* This is one grim read. There's so much detailed description of misogyny and the abuse of women that it's hard to get beyond the first quarter and keep on reading. If it hadn't had the Booker listing, I would certainly have given up on it. There's also the clichéd image of working-class Glasgow, a place of squalor, abuse and relentless violence. Here we go again: Sighthill a working-class hell, where it's pretty much inevitable that men beat up and rape their wives (and any other women they get a chance at grabbing), women are grimly accepting of this fate, even while they're furious and trying to fight back, unless they're on the drink or drugs, and kids had better stay out of the way. Boys had better be boys, too, or else – Shuggie as a boy is gradually becoming aware of his sexuality, and that he disgusts most other boys and men with this 'unnatural' behaviour, and his father is ashamed of him. You have to look a long way to find a smidgeon of kindness or support or anything a little more positive. It's a case of slogging all the way through almost to the end. As an evocation of a miserable and thankless life in which an isolated boy has to care for his mother who is completely lost to alcoholism, it's convincing and thorough and, in the end, quite moving. But don't read this one for fun... --- ## Why Shop on Desertcart? - 🛒 **Trusted by 1.3+ Million Shoppers** — Serving international shoppers since 2016 - 🌍 **Shop Globally** — Access 737+ million products across 21 categories - 💰 **No Hidden Fees** — All customs, duties, and taxes included in the price - 🔄 **15-Day Free Returns** — Hassle-free returns (30 days for PRO members) - 🔒 **Secure Payments** — Trusted payment options with buyer protection - ⭐ **TrustPilot Rated 4.5/5** — Based on 8,000+ happy customer reviews **Shop now:** [https://www.desertcart.sn/products/230879670-shuggie-bain-the-million-copy-bestseller-and-winner-of-booker](https://www.desertcart.sn/products/230879670-shuggie-bain-the-million-copy-bestseller-and-winner-of-booker) --- *Product available on Desertcart Senegal* *Store origin: SN* *Last updated: 2026-09-15*