by Duncan MacLaren

Seduced, for once, by the extensive hype of Shuggie Bain as a Booker contender and then as the winner, I shelled out £14.99 to pre-lockdown Waterstone’s to buy it in hardback and read its 430 pages in only a few, engrossed but longish sittings. Douglas Stuart can certainly write and he has learned an almost Ian Rankin-like capacity for timing, so there was no counting of the pages until the next chapter. But it comes with a health warning - pastoral idyll, it ain’t!