As he did so deftly in Shuggie Bain, Stuart takes us readers deep into the working class world of Glasgow - here, circa early 1990s - where jobs and trade unions have been gutted.
Stuart structures this story mostly in the form of a flashback to the months preceding this menacing camping trip. But that sweetness unsettled other boys." Mungo suffers from anxiety as his kindly older sister, Jodie, reflects: "There was a gentleness to his being that put girls at ease they wanted to make a pet of him. Sandwiched between the two men in the back of a bus, Mungo has a bad feeling, so his chronic facial tic starts acting up. They're taking Mungo off for a camping trip, where he's to be taught to gut fish, make a fire, learn to be a man. 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. A coming-of-age story about a gay, working-class boy set in 1980s Glasgow, in which the characters sometimes speak in Scots dialect.
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