"Shuggie Bain's story has blown me away. It's really good, the best debut I've read in many years. A heartbreaking story that, although it can be hard at times, is written with enormous warmth and great compassion for its characters.

Karl Ove Knausgård, The Guardian

In the early 1980s, Glasgow is dying: the once prosperous mining town is now plagued by Thatcher's policies, pushing families into unemployment and despair. Agnes Bain is a beautiful and unlucky woman who always dreamed of achieving a better life: a nice house and happiness that she didn't have to pay in installments. When her husband, an expansive and womanizing taxi driver, abandons her for another, Agnes finds herself alone in charge of three children in a neighborhood mired in misery and disappointment, sinking deeper and deeper into the bottomless pit of drink. Her children will do everything possible to save her, but, forced to get ahead themselves, they will end up surrendering one by one. Everyone except Shuggie, the youngest son, the only one who refuses to give in, the one who, with his unconditional love, keeps Agnes afloat.

Shuggie, a sensitive, effeminate, and somewhat overbearing boy, is mortified that the miners' children laugh at him and that the adults call him "different", but, stubborn as he is, he is also convinced that if he tries To the maximum, he will manage to be as "normal" as the other boys and will be able to help his mother to escape from this place without hope.

Winner of the prestigious Booker Prize, Shuggie Bain's Story is a tender and devastating novel about poverty and the limits of love, a narrative that, with its compassionate look at a woman's painful struggle against addiction, frustration and loneliness, stands as a moving tribute to the unwavering faith of a son determined to save his mother no matter what.