Safe Return Doubtful

I’ve spent the last few days in the company of Shuggie Bain and am that much better for it.
It’s a very good book, but it has a few especially memorable scenes.
Shuggie is different. From the age of six he dresses well, he speaks without the local accent, he walks in a way that attracts bullying. As he gets older Stuart lets the reader form their own impressions of him. Gay? maybe, maybe not; but certainly different – more caring and understanding, less laddish than his bigoted and chauvanistic peers.
One of those memorable scenes is when Shuggie in eight and a half, and with his sixteen year old brother Leek on the slag heaps at Pithead. Leek showing Shuggie how to walk without attracting the tormenting of other boys.. ‘make room for your cock’.
Another occurs early in the book when Agnes hosts a catalogue evening. She reveals a bag of knock-off Playtex Cross Your Heart bras for the women to try on.
The other scene I would single out for special praise is the finale, with his friend Leanne and her mother.
For me, it just pips Apeirogon as the best I’ve read on the Booker Longlist, and is too close to call with Hughes’s The Wild Laughter as best of the year so far.

A couple of quotes that really stood out… (reposted..)

..he pulled up in front of DiRollo’s chippy, open twenty-four hours, bog-standard. DiRollo’s was popular with both cabbies and prostitutes because of the unsociable hours and discretion of its owner.
Joe DiRollo stood behind the counter, as he seemed to do every hour of the day. At night the fluorescent light made him look deceased. A small man, hair thin and slicked back off his face, with chip grease or Brylcream or both. Like an oily iceberg only his swollen head and shoulders were visible above the counter. The rest of his sallow bulk was squished up against the machete he kept under the counter. He greeted everyone with a phlegmy clearing of the throat and tilting of his fat head.

The bleaker sections, of which there are many, can be equally spell-binding..
ven the bleaker parts can be spellbinding..

Now, in the evenings, the eldest of the miners’ sons stood at the train tracks with beers and bags of glue and watched with sadness and spite the happy faces roar by every thirty minutes. They fondled their cousins’ tits under baggy Aran jumpers and ran across the tracks in front of speeding trains, their soft hair whipped by the near miss. They threw bottles of piss at the windows, and when the driver let fly his angry horn, they felt seen by the world, they felt alive.