Who is popular today?

This Booker-longlisted tale of poverty and addiction in 1980s Scotland offers deep insight into the relationship between a child and a substance-abusing parent
We first meet Shuggie Bain as a 16-year-old in 1992, living alone in a dirty bedsit on the Southside of Glasgow and working on a supermarket deli counter where his boss overlooks lapses in hygiene because underage labour is cheap. This debut novel tells us how he got here.
Back to 1981 and Agnes Bain is leaning from the window of the high-rise council block where she, her second husband and her three children live “all crammed together in her mammy’s flat”. Agnes is drinking, smoking, playing cards and betting the housekeeping money with three friends, “their respite from ironing in front of the telly and heating tins of beans for ungrateful weans”. The evening degenerates until “Big Shug Bain” returns from driving his taxi and takes the other women home, returning hours later; she knows what he has been doing because that’s how her own relationship with him began. Alone, Agnes remembers an early holiday together in Blackpool, Shug dragging her up the stairs of a cheap B&B by her hair when she was too drunk to walk, raping her and then offering to take her dancing the next night. Continue reading...