He's, reluctantly, in the company of two men, strangers, both hard-looking.
The novel opens on a scene of Mungo being led away from his tenement home as his mother, drinking a tea mug of fortified wine, watches impassively from a window. What's different about Stuart's new novel is its form: The outer frame here is a suspense story a story not just of innocence lost, but slaughtered.Īuthor Interviews 'Shuggie Bain' Will Lift You Up - And Tear You Up
The two characters, in fact, share some crucial similarities: like Shuggie, 15-year-old Mungo Hamilton is gay and Mungo's mother is also an alcoholic. Reading it is like peering into the apartment of yet another broken family whose Glasgow tenement might be down the road from Shuggie Bain's. Young Mungo, like its predecessor, is a nuanced and gorgeous heartbreaker of a novel. It's tough to follow such a success story, but if Stuart was cowed, his latest novel doesn't betray any artistic hesitations. Such a tale is not an easy sell, which is why Douglas Stuart's debut novel, Shuggie Bain, was initially turned down by over 30 publishers before finding an audience and eventually winning the Booker Prize in 2020. I hope you love Mungo and the dysfunctional Hamilton family as much as I do.A coming-of-age story about a gay, working-class boy set in 1980s Glasgow, in which the characters sometimes speak in Scots dialect. Said Stuart himself in a video for Waterstones Bookstore and on Twitter, “ Young Mungo was a book that I actually began writing long before Shuggie was published and finished before Shuggie was nominated for the Booker, so I hope you’ll find it comes from that very personal space. Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the push and pull of family, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much. And yet against all odds Mungo and James become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. 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. 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.
Reads the synopsis, in part:įive years in the writing, Young Mungo is a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a deeply moving and highly suspenseful story of the dangerous first love of two young men: Mungo and James. Fresh off Shuggie Bain’s Booker win, Douglas Stuart has announced his new novel, Young Mungo, is forthcoming from Grove (US), Knopf Canada, and Picador (UK), in April 2022.Īside from having an incredibly sticky title, Young Mungo is promised to be a wrenching love story set against the working-class housing estates on Glasgow’s East End.
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