Naive and fairly innocent, her parents are divorced and she lives with her mother, a carer, who is good at understanding children although she ironically has trouble relating to her daughter.Feeling a shared sense of loneliness, the narrator and Clara bond over mutual interests In vivid and bruising prose, it let us into the working-class world of young Shuggie and his alcoholic mum Agnes in a story of survival and grit, shame and pain, love and (eventually) a sexual awakening too