Bookmarked Places

Shuggie Bain grows up as the youngest child in a working-class family in 1980s Glasgow. Shuggie idolises his mother, Agnes, a strikingly beautiful woman who dreams of a glamorous life but finds herself trapped in the harsh realities of poverty, unemployment, and a growing alcohol addiction. His father, a serial adulterer and wife-beater, is largely absent. A sensitive and slightly effeminate boy, Shuggie is bullied at school and prefers to stay at home and care for his mother.

“Milkman” tells the story of an 18-year-old girl from a working-class neighbourhood in a city in Northern Ireland. Set during the height of the Troubles in the 1970s, she finds herself being stalked by a Republican paramilitary officer. As rumours circulate that she is having an affair with this man, tensions rise within her community, and particularly with her mother.

Tony Webster, a retired man, looks back on his school days in the 1960s, in particular his friendship with Adrian Finn, an exceptionally intelligent boy. Tony reflects on the choices he and his friends later made, and on how those decisions shaped their lives. In the second part of the novel, Tony is drawn back into the past when he reconnects with his former girlfriend, Veronica Ford, who later became Adrian’s lover. He is forced to confront a bitter letter he once sent to Adrian and discovers that Veronica possesses Adrian’s diary. As fragments of memory resurface, Tony begins to question the reliability of his own recollections.