FM praises an exceptional novel and an inspiring life
For those still to read it, Shuggie Bain might seem an unlikely best-seller, Booker Prize-winner, and modern Scottish classic.
Even after reading it, 32 publishers rejected Douglas Stuart’s manuscript. Not perhaps Decca’s Dick Rowe turning down the Beatles but in the same bookshop.
The novel detailing a 1980s childhood darkly coloured by a parent’s alcoholism is harrowing, funny, brutal and hopeful, often on the same page, sometimes in the same paragraph.
But the book, charting a young boy’s attempts to save his defiant, glamorous and tragic mother Agnes and himself as her drinking topples their lives into chaos, has become an international hit after an astonishing year when it won the Booker Prize, making Stuart only the second Scot, after James Kelman in 1994, to win Britain’s premier prize for fiction.
Published just as the pandemic struck, it went on to become a best-seller, published in 22 languages across the world with translations including Arabic, Croatian, Japanese, and Hebrew. A TV adaptation is in the works.
The book, not an autobiography but drawn from Stuart’s own childhood in Glasgow, took 10 years to write and finally found a home after gathering a pile of publishers’ rejection slips.
Tomorrow, Nicola Sturgeon will interview the author at the Edinburgh Book Festival and, writing for The Sunday Post today, says it will be a privilege as she salutes the author’s “inspirational life and exceptional novel.”
In a Sunday Post interview last year after his Booker win, Stuart, who left Scotland to build a successful fashion career in New York, where he still lives, said of his novel: “It’s about love. Children have a tenacious love for flawed parents. It is quite shocking, quite harrowing, but it’s also just life. I don’t see the darkness any more. It’s very narrow, but I see the hope.”
Here, the first minister and best-selling author Lee Child, one of the Booker judges, salute Shuggie Bain.