Shuggie Bain is beautifully written, as so many reviewers have said, and of course that beautiful writing contributed to Douglas Stuart's 2020 Booker Prize win. But is so unrelentingly bleak. I made myself finish it because it's a story that should be read, a story about life lived in poverty and bleak unhappiness, and about alcoholism that causes despair. It's also about the desperate hope that surfaces when, for a time, the drinking stops. But the dire emotional state of the children of the alcoholic is almost too poignant to bear (although I made myself read it because I knew I should know better how life is for children of alcoholics and people with little hope and no money). And there is a sort of redemption at the end. But it takes a long time to get there (literally and metaphorically, Shuggie Bain is a long novel) and this book certainly isn't one to escape into during lockdown.