“It’s very Scottish to be direct about difficult things,” Douglas Stuart said in an interview for The New Yorker. And Shuggie Bain, his debut novel (which won the 2020 Booker Prize), certainly lives up to this assertion. The novel, which he wrote over the course of a decade while carrying on a career in fashion, is about coming of age as a queer boy in a homophobic community; it is about the complicated love that exists in families where addiction is present; and it is about the struggles working class families faced in Scotland under the devastating policies of Margaret Thatcher.
Shuggie, the youngest of Agnes Bain’s three children, grows up in a home where abuse is the norm, whether...
