Love is a difficult subject for even the most skilled novelists to tackle, but perhaps especially so for contemporary Scottish writers. The challenge comes in two halves. The first is the result of our recent history. The post-industrial landscape in which many Scottish writers came of age has been defined in the national consciousness by its very absence of love: what time is there to talk about such luxuries, these places seem to ask, when the day-to-day traumas of poverty, addiction and sectarian violence seem that much more visceral, that much more worthy of study? The second half is more cultural. Northern climates don’t seem to be very conducive to talking about emotions. As the old saying goes: “a Scotsman once loved a woman so, so much… that he nearly told her.”
Douglas Stuart directly confronted this Scottish taboo in his 2020 Booker Prize-winning first novel Shuggie Bain, a moving account of 1980s Glasgow in which even the most flawed and difficult people—in particular Shuggie’s mother Agnes—are still capable of eliciting our love. It also offered a riposte to the tired assumption that working-class life is composed of nothing but drudgery. In Shuggie Bain, crippling poverty has not turned love into some rationed commodity to be scrimped and stowed away like everything else—but rather made it the bedrock on which everybody’s survival depends.