"Young Hugh " Shuggie" Bain is a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Shuggie's mother Agnes is Shiggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion's share of each week's benefits on cans of extra-strong lager. Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning...

Having suffered abuse and misfortune for much of her life, a young child searches for a better life and finally gets a break in the home of a loving woman with several foster children.

"From the author of the best-selling Sweetbitter comes an intimate, searingly honest memoir of growing up the child of addicts, of how that turbulent, often harrowing experience has affected her at every stage of her life, and of how she has struggled to transcend this unwanted legacy. When Sweetbitter was published to great success, the author knew she should be happy, but she felt incapable of it, emotionally shut down. She knew too that the roots...

[This book] is [an] account of one of the most severe child abuse cases in California history. It is the story of Dave Pelzer, who was brutally beaten and starved by his emotionally unstable, alcoholic mother: a mother who played torturous, unpredictable games - games that left him nearly dead. He had to learn how to play his mother's games in order to survive because she no longer considered him a son, but a slave; and no longer a boy, but an "it."--Back...

"The story of the dangerous first love of two young men: Mungo and James. Born under different stars--Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic--they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Their environment is a hyper-masculine and sectarian one, for gangs of young men and the violence they might dole out dominate the Glaswegian estate where they live. And yet against all odds Mungo and James become best friends as they find a...

"A man mourning his alcoholic father faces a paradox: to pay tribute, lay scorn upon, or pour a drink. A wrenching, dazzling, revelatory debut"--

Abandoned by the alcoholic father who idealized the natural world without imparting any survival skills to his children, three siblings in 1970s New York embark on difficult adult lives before their father attempts a reconciliation.

"In this dazzling debut, Emilie Pine speaks to the events that have marked her life--those emotional disruptions for which our society has no adequate language, at once bittersweet, clandestine, and ordinary. She writes with radical honesty on the unspeakable grief of infertility, on caring for an alcoholic parent, on taboos around female bodies and female pain, on sexual violence and violence against the self. This is the story of one woman, and...

"In the tradition of parent-child memoirs from The Liar's Club to The Glass Castle, here is the haunting story of a daughter's quest to understand her father, to save him from his own demons and to save herself from following his self-destructive path. Marco Antonio was born in Mexico but as a teenager migrated with his large family north to California, where he met Jean's mother, a young Puerto Rican woman just out of med school. Marco was a self-taught...