Shuggie Bain Study Guide

Douglas Stuart was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in the Sighthill neighborhood, where he grew up with his two older siblings. His father left early in his life, and he lived with his mother and siblings until his mother passed from complications of alcoholism when he was 16. After her death, he moved into a boarding house on his own. Stuart went on to earn his bachelor’s at the Scottish College of Textiles and his master’s degree at the Royal College of Art in London. He has primarily worked in the fashion industry in New York with several world-renowned brands. In addition to his work in textiles, he began writing smaller pieces that were published in The New Yorker and LitHub. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, received broad praise and won the Booker Prize in 2020. Heriot-Watt University subsequently awarded Stuart an honorary doctorate in 2021. His second novel, Young Mungo, was published in April 2022. Stuart is a dual citizen of the United Kingdom and the United States, and he currently lives in New York with his husband, Michael Cary.

Economic instability serves as a main backdrop in Shuggie Bain. In the 1980s, during which the majority of the novel is set, the Scottish economy experienced a severe downturn. During Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, there was a steep climb in unemployment across the country and a simultaneous decline in manufacturing, especially along the Western Coast of Scotland. The resulting recession and societal unrest colors a good deal of the novel. Another pervasive issue in the text is the divide within Scotland between Catholic and Protestant communities. This divide is rooted in the Scottish Reformation of the 16th century, when the country officially changed its religious affiliation from Roman Catholicism to Presbyterianism. During the Great Famine in the 19th century, a large number of Irish Catholic immigrants settled in Glasgow, Scotland, increasing competition for housing and employment that has led to long-standing animosity between the two religious groups. The economic unrest in Scotland in the 1980s exacerbated these issues.

Like Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart’s second novel, Young Mungo, considers the challenges of growing up queer and impoverished in 1980s Scotland. Milkman by Anna Burns, which won the Booker Prize in 2018, similarly explores tumultuous coming-of-age experiences within a sectarian society—Northern Ireland, in this case. Burns’s novel is also characterized by the striking use of regional dialect and idiosyncrasies. Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life is another example of a contemporary bildungsroman story, as it depicts the formative years of a group of friends and explores similarly difficult themes around intolerance, sexual and physical abuse, and illness.