We are returning to Scotland so I read this book at the suggestion of my friend Katie, who sent a BBC Podcast interviewing the author and hooked me. It’s a Booker Prize winner and when I read fiction I tend to focus on mystery or more uplifting stories rather than the heavier tomes that tend to win the Booker Prize but I am really glad I tried this one. It’s the story of Shuggie, a boy living in a Council House in Thatcher era Glasgow, where the shipbuilding, mining, and steel working jobs have disappeared leaving working people like the protagonists of this book living in poverty. Shuggie’s father is a taxi driver and his mother is a beauty who fancies herself a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. She seeks solace from her life of poverty in alcohol (hiding lager cans in her purse) and her addiction is exacerbated when her husband leaves her and her daughter marries and moves to South Africa. Shuggie cares for his mother as she sinks further into alcoholism, through a short period of sobriety, additional men who abuse her, the departure of her older son, a suicide attempt and then through the alcoholic binges that eventually kill her. He is a small and effeminate boy considered “no right” by the neighbors who is bullied by his contemporaries and thus misses school a lot.   This book contains every trigger imaginable from drugs to suicide to abuse.  The themes of love, loss, the impact of poverty, and the effects of Thatcherism combined with the beautiful writing and the descriptions of Glasgow along with the compelling story made this a memorable book even though it is dark and depressing.