Books like Shuggie Bain
In 1980s Glasgow, Shuggie, a gentle, different boy, devotes his childhood to saving his glamorous mother Agnes from the drinking that is destroying her, as poverty closes in around them.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Shuggie Bain
Young Mungo
A queer teenager in 1990s Glasgow falls for a Protestant boy, and the sectarian violence of the city mirrors the violence inside his home.
John of John
In the late 1990s, John-Calum, a twenty-two-year-old art school graduate, comes home to the family croft on the Isle of Harris when his father, a weaver and a deacon in a strict Presbyterian church, summons him with news that his grandmother is dying, though she seems in no hurry to go.
Trainspotting
Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, and Spud run together through heroin-era 1980s Leith in a novel written out in the Edinburgh that English-reading publishing had previously been allowed to leave out.
Bastard Out of Carolina
Ruth Anne 'Bone' Boatwright grows up among the hard-drinking, fiercely loyal Boatwright clan of Greenville, South Carolina, while her mother's new husband turns her childhood into a fight to survive.
How Late It Was, How Late
Sammy, a Glasgow ex-con, wakes up in a lane after a two-day drinking binge, gets into a fight with the police and comes round in a cell, blind.
We the Animals
Three brothers run wild in upstate New York, sons of a Puerto Rican father and a white mother from Brooklyn whose love for each other is as volatile as it is fierce.
Joe
Joe Ransom, a hard-drinking ex-convict who runs a crew poisoning trees for a timber company in north Mississippi, takes on a teenage boy from a drifter family and tries to protect him from his own father.
Funny Boy
Arjie, a Tamil boy growing up in Colombo in the 1970s and 80s, discovers he is gay as the tensions that will become Sri Lanka's civil war tighten around his family.
The Grapes of Wrath
A dispossessed Oklahoma family drives west to California during the Dust Bowl, finding not the promised land but exploitation, hunger, and the limits of dignity.
The Great Believers
In 1980s Chicago, art gallery director Yale Tishman watches the AIDS epidemic take his friends, and in 2015 Fiona, the sister of one of them, searches Paris for her estranged daughter.
The Harp in the South
The Darcys, a poor Irish Catholic family, live in a crowded terrace in Surry Hills in Sydney in the 1940s, where Roie, the elder daughter, is growing up.
The Eye of the Sheep
Jimmy Flick, a boy who sees the world differently, lives with his loving mother and his violent father in a house in the suburbs of Melbourne.