I am conflicted about this book. There has been much hype about it and, obviously, it won the Booker Prize. There is no doubt that it is a well written book, with a language that flows easily.

However, it is also a grim and depressing story. I found I could only read so much of it at a time and I was glad to have reached its end. There is nothing graphically awful described in the pages of the book but the misery, in what feels more like a series of scenes rather than a flowing narrative, is relentless.

The book is really about Agnes Bain and her destructive alcoholism; its effects on her and her family. Her youngest son, Shuggie, though playing a central part, is not really the main character we are expecting from the title.

Stuart could easily be accused of wallowing in all that bleakness. He offers only little hope to his characters, like tiny chinks of sun shyly poking between ominous gray clouds looming over Glasgow. And the clouds are always quick to gather closer and extinguish the light.