Unflinching in its detail, Shuggie Bain is a worthy Booker Prize winner – Sydney Morning Herald

When Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain, he said that he thought he would always be “inspired by gentle souls surviving in hard places”. That’s not a bad summary of Stuart’s vibrant, sinewy account of a 1980s Glaswegian childhood much like his own, spent in thrall to a mother who is glamorous, charismatic and herself enslaved to alcohol. That sounds like the stuff of misery memoirs, but Stuart has turned this life into something more like a Breughel painting, stuffed…

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