We never saw 2020 coming. When Happy Ned Year 2019 hit the paper a year ago, I sure did not foresee that the next year would so vigorously reframe the very essence of this now 20-year-old column: To celebrate the strange and unexpected, and obscure stuff either unearthed or made up.
So here again goes Happy Ned Year, your annual random scrum of crumbs swept from the tattered tablecloth of 2020.
(Was the cocktail year 2020 not the perfect time for mixing metaphors?)
And, Happy 2021; our sense of optimism gives new meaning to the phrase âa new ring.â
Itâs amazing: I Googled, and could not find, any play on the word toxin as âtalk sin.â Not even from the lips of some super-spreader church pastor.
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize
The critics’ top eight choices based on Christmas selections in national newspapers, the London Evening Standard, the TLS, The Spectator and the New Statesman. Plus, we take a look at some of the other best books which were released in 2020.
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
The winner of this year’s Booker Prize is a tale of poverty, addiction and abuse set in and around Glasgow in the 1980s. Shuggie Bain’s mother is an alcoholic; his father, a violent, fitfully present taxi driver. As family members drift away, he becomes his mother’s sole carer – and it is their relationship that forms the novel’s emotional core. First-time author Douglas Stuart was praised for his poetic, slang-studded prose, and for his ability to find good in his characters, no matter how despicable their behaviour. Some critics, however, thought the book would have benefited from more rigorous editing.