A lot of novels use poverty. It’s a costume rack: a bit of grime, a bit of dialect, a “raw” atmosphere you can admire from a safe seat. Addiction gets it even worse—either monstered up into melodrama or polished into that smug publishing mood called “redemption.” Douglas Stuart refuses both cheats. He writes poverty and addiction as environments with rules, not as backstory. He doesn’t ask you to sympathise and move on. He makes you sit inside the systems that keep people stuck, and he doesn’t let you pretend it’s just personal failure with sad music behind it.
Shuggie Bain is the book that proved the point, and not because it won prizes. Because it won’t let you aestheticise what it shows you. The Glasgow of the 1980s and early 1990s isn’t a gritty postcard; it’s post-industrial fallout, families boxed in by money, housing, pride, and the way a whole country learned to call cruelty “policy.” Agnes’s drinking isn’t a symbol. It’s a daily force that rearranges the household around it: the routines, the bargains, the excuses, the humiliations that become normal because they have to. Stuart doesn’t romanticise the mother’s glamour or demonise her into a cautionary tale. He makes addiction visible as constant negotiation—need against shame, performance against collapse.
The hard thing he does, the thing most writers dodge, is refuse the reader a safe moral distance. You don’t get to stand above these lives and feel enlightened. He writes the small transactions that make survival possible and dignity expensive. That’s why the book hurts: it won’t allow the comfortable fantasy that love is enough. Love is present. Love is also not a shield against rent, hunger, or a state that has decided your street is expendable.
Poverty in Stuart isn’t “grit”; it’s a narrowing corridor where every choice is punished and every kindness costs someone something real.
And yes—his books split people, viciously, especially Shuggie Bain. Some readers call it misery porn, as if naming suffering is the same as selling it. Others clutch at it as “inspirational,” which is just misery porn with nicer manners. Then there’s the more revealing discomfort: people who can’t handle that the mother isn’t a tidy villain, that the child isn’t a saint, that the language isn’t filed down for visitor access. The harsh opinions aren’t proof the book fails. They’re proof it lands where it’s meant to land: on the reader’s habit of wanting the working class either purified into moral lessons or degraded into spectacle. Stuart denies both. He shows the mess without letting you claim superiority over it.
His language is part of the assault. He uses Scots and Glasgow speech without translating it into polite literary English for outside approval. That isn’t “authenticity” as decoration. It’s control of the room. It tells the reader: you will meet these people on their terms or you won’t meet them at all. Publishing loves dialect as a spice—sprinkle it on, make the poor feel “vivid,” then switch back to the approved voice when the emotions get serious. Stuart does the opposite. The voice is the seriousness. It carries the social world inside it: who gets mocked, who gets heard, who gets written off as “rough,” who gets to sound like they belong.
Then Young Mungo arrives and refuses any lazy reading that Shuggie Bain was a one-off misery miracle. He goes back to early-1990s Glasgow and keeps pressing the same bruise: poverty as pressure, masculinity as a cage, sectarian identity as another way to police bodies. The love story is there, but it’s not a comfort blanket. It’s a risk in a world that treats tenderness like treason. Parental neglect isn’t a dramatic device; it’s the default condition, the background radiation of lives where adults are drowning too. Stuart doesn’t write “bad choices.” He writes restricted options dressed up as morality.
What makes him unbearable—in the best way—is that he won’t let the reader outsource blame to a single villain. The “villains” are everywhere: landlords, wages, stigma, peer violence, institutions that look away, and the culture that keeps insisting people should pull themselves up by strength they were never allowed to build. He shows you how scarcity turns people into border guards of their own misery.
If a reader can call these novels “inspiring,” they’re using the characters as a gym for their feelings and leaving the politics at the door.
Stuart makes poverty and addiction impossible to look away from because he won’t let you turn them into atmosphere. He won’t let you treat survival as virtue and collapse as weakness. He writes the costs, the trade-offs, the way love gets dragged through the mud of material reality. Don’t congratulate the books for being “brave,” and don’t dismiss them because they won’t give you a clean exit. Read them as accusation, and keep looking.