This novel deserves the Booker Prize

Cal Revely-Calder admires an astonishing debut, its tragedy suffused with light, about a boy in 1980s Glasgow

SSHUGGIE BAIN by Douglas Stuart 448pp, Picador, £14.99, ebook £8.99

ome people call alcoholism “a tragedy”, and others sneer at giving it such dignity. But calling the problem “tragic” doesn’t mean that it’s especially grand – it can seem repetitive and banal – just that alcoholics hurt those around them by making them witnesses. That’s the heart of a tragedy: its audience can’t change the story, they know it’s fiction, but they’re transfixed by it – even distressed.

Shuggie Bain, the debut novel by Douglas Stuart, is a tragedy, and – as it should be – a searing, upsetting work. It centres on the alcoholism of a middle-aged mother, and the desperation of her son.

The setting is 1980s Glasgow, where Agnes Bain, a woman defined by her beauty and pride, and insistent on her claim to both, lives in the north-eastern housing estates. She begins in Sighthill, then moves to Pithead, a former mining community where the unemployed men are destroyed by drink, and the women are thin, brutal matriarchs who know “the keen edge of need”.

Agnes lives with her ravening thirst, and, as lesser priorities, her son Shuggie (aka Hugh) and his elder siblings, Leek (Alexander) and Catherine. There’s also a string of men – Agnes’s giro is never enough for the lager bill – all of them low-lifes at best. The first is Big Shug (also Hugh), a taxidriver and Shuggie’s father; then Eugene, another taxi-driver and Agnes’s next boyfriend; and later, as matters degrade, a line of casual abusers who stop by the Pithead house.

But Shuggie is her constant star. We first meet him in 1992; he’s 16 years old, and lives in a hostel, fending off seedy men. While trying to find work as a hairdresser, he’s doing shifts on a deli counter on Glasgow’s South Side.

This is the prelude to a vast, magnificent flashback, which starts in 1981. In the back rooms of a stuffy flat are Catherine (17), Leek (15) and Shuggie (only 5); in