Author(s): Douglas Stuart

Staff Picks- Read our reviews

A story of queer love and working-class families, Young Mungo is the brilliant second novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain. Douglas Stuart's first novel Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, is one of the most successful literary debuts of the century so far. Published or forthcoming in forty territories, it has sold more than one million copies worldwide.   Now Stuart returns with Young Mungo, his extraordinary second novel. Both a page-turner and literary tour de force, it 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. Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars - Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic - and they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. And when several months later Mungo's mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future. Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in the literary world, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.

What do you do as an author, when your very first novel (Shuggie Bain) goes and wins the Booker Prize? Well, in the case of Douglas Stuart you go ahead and write an even better one!

Mungo and Shuggie have a lot in common. Both stories have a young man, struggling to grow up in the mean streets of Glasgow with an alcoholic mother, an absent father and generally dysfunctional siblings, although sister Jodie has a lot more going for her than brother Hugo, who could be described as someone with definite psychopathic tendencies.

As a teenager, Protestant Mungo becomes friends and then falls in love with Catholic James - a situation that must be hidden from the hyper-masculine, sectarian and homophobic world in which they live. Mungo lives in a constant state of fear, mainly for James’s safety at the hands of brother Hugo, should they ever be discovered. When Mungo’s mother sends him on a fishing trip with two strange men, to a remote area of Scotland, he discovers brutality and violence that he has to fight with all his inner strength to survive and return to James and fulfill their dream of escaping together to a better life.

As an author Douglas Stuart is obviously following the maxim of “write what you know”. As a native Glaswegian his descriptions and dialogue evoke the cold, foggy, lonely streets of a Glaswegian housing estate and the characters that live there – actually considering the high level of poverty and deprivation the people actually “exist” rather than “live”. Mungo himself is a gentle soul who you find yourself cheering for, while willing his sister Jodie on to the better life she can vaguely imagine and hoping for his brother to meet a bad end. “Young Mungo” takes you on an emotional journey that does (thankfully) leave you smiling at the end. I thoroughly recommend it!