After his debut about a gay boy in 80s Glasgow, comes another tale drawing on his childhood. Could his glittering fashion career ever have kept the Booker-winner from his roots?
After Shuggie Bain was published, Douglas Stuart prepared to pack in writing and go back to the day job. He’d spent 10 years on his debut novel, then it came out during a pandemic. “It was the first week of lockdown. I thought, ‘God, this is the end of my publishing career.’” Stuart couldn’t complain. It had received fabulous reviews, even if nobody was buying it, and he knew he could walk straight back into a top job in fashion.
Then Shuggie got nominated for the Booker prize and America’s National Book Award for Fiction. In fact, between 2020 and 2021, it was shortlisted for well over 20 major awards. Not bad for a book that had been rejected by more than 40 publishers. It went on to win the Booker, which inevitably boosted sales. But here was something different. A novel that had been considered inaccessible and unmarketable was selling by the shelfload in supermarkets. To date, it has sold more than 1.3m copies in the English language alone. This brutal love story about a young gay boy trying to protect his alcoholic mother from herself and the ravages of the world, partially written in the Scottish vernacular, had huge popular appeal. Perhaps even more remarkable, Stuart had not read a book for pleasure until he was 16.
