Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

This book won the Booker Prize this year, and that honor is well deserved--or at least I think it is, because it is very very good. My hesitation is that I have only read less than half of the long list, and so cannot say if it is the most deserving. One review of it I read struck true to me, that this is a modern Dickensian novel, meaning it has many of the notes that are lovable about the best of what Dickens wrote. It takes place in depressed 1980s Thatcher era Scotland — rife with unemployment, the erosion of industries like shipbuilding, mining, and iron working; and a deep recession. Shuggie Bain is a young, sensitive and somewhat prissy boy maneuvering in this world of men demoralized by the closure of mines, women sunk under the weight of drink and drugs, and families living week to week on public assistance and disability benefits. His mother drinks their weekly money for food, his father slept around and then made another family for himself without looking back, his brother is trying but it is every man for himself, and this is about Shuggie, the boy who was left behind to largely fend for himself with almost no tools in his belt to do so.