Shuggie Bain. London: Picador, 2020.

DOUGLAS STUART (b.1976)
Shuggie Bain. London: Picador, 2020.
First UK hardback edition of the 2020 Booker Prize winner, signed by the author and augmented with a fine pen and ink drawing and over 1000 words of annotations. Shuggie Bain tells the story of a young working-class boy growing up in Glasgow and caring for his mother Agnes through her addiction to alcohol, while struggling to fit in to a society that believes he is ‘no right’. The author’s annotations are touchingly personal in nature and point to the elements of his own life upon which the story is based – the places of his youth, his mother’s struggle with addiction and his own experiences of being gay at that time in Glasgow. Other annotations relate to the difficulties of writing certain chapters, the editorial choices he faced, and show a deep human sympathy for his characters: ‘at its heart this is a story about belonging – about where do we fit in when we were born to stand out’. On the half-title is a full-page pen and ink illustration captioned ‘Saint Agnese in Agony’, associating the agony of the Christian martyr sentenced to death by burning with that of Shuggie’s mother.

Octavo. Original black boards, gilt lettering to spine, pictorial dust jacket.

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