Shuggie Bain
Douglas Stuart · 2020
A boy's fierce, bewildered love for his alcoholic mother in Thatcher's Glasgow. Stuart's debut is devastating in the specific way that only deeply personal novels can be, rooted in lived experience and radiating outward into a portrait of social abandonment and queer childhood.
The case against
Agnes drinks, rallies, relapses, and the novel runs that loop for four hundred pages until repetition becomes the argument; you either accept the design or feel locked inside it. Stuart spares you nothing, and sparing nothing has costs: the misery is so unbroken that tenderness arrives like contraband. A shorter book would have cut deeper.
Best of Last 10 Years · the Pro canon
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
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