There are characters you will hate and characters you will come to love. a novel that will capture your interest from the first page and immerse you in a world from which you want to escape but from which, like its protagonist, you can’t. And the language is so well tuned that it transforms a working-class tale into a literary tour de force. well worth the slog through unfamiliar lingo. the American reader will need a Scottish to English dictionary to get through some of the local language. A novel that digs through the grit and grime of 1980s Glasgow to reveal a story that is at once touching and gripping. A novel that explores the underbelly of Scottish society.

A novel that takes places during the Thatcher years and, in a way, defines it. It also feels like a moving act of filial reverence. As a result, this overwhelmingly vivid novel is not just an accomplished debut. Otherwise, the author is too generous-and, it would seem, too fond of his mother-for the central focus to lie anywhere but in the fierce, warm-hearted portrait of Agnes in all her maddening glory.

Stuart’s capacity for allowing wild contradictions to convincingly coexist is also on display in the individual vignettes that comprise the novel, blending the tragic with the funny, the unsparing with the tender, the compassionate with the excruciating. Not only is Shuggie Bain dedicated to his mother, but in the acknowledgments he writes that 'I owe everything to the memories of my mother and her struggle' he’s clearly determined to give all the contradictory aspects of that struggle their full due. Stuart’s Grassic Gibbon–like ability to combine love and horror, and to give equal weight to both. It is, then, a testament to Douglas Stuart’s talent that all this literary history-along with the tough portraits of Glaswegian working-class life from William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, and Agnes Owens-can be felt in Shuggie Bain without either overshadowing or unbalancing the novel.

Undercurrent by Douglas Stewart