Douglas Stuart

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER "Young Mungo seals it: Douglas Stuart is a genius." —The Washington Post From the Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain, Young Mungo is both a vivid portrayal of working-class life and the deeply moving story of the dangerous first love of two young men. Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in a hyper-masculine world. They are caught between two of Glasgow’s housing estates where young working-class men divide themselves along sectarian lines, and fight territorial battles for the sake of reputation. They should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all, and yet they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the dovecote that James has built for his prize racing pigeons. As they begin to fall in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, and Mungo must work hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. But the threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable. When Mungo’s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland, with two strange men behind whose drunken banter lie murky pasts, he needs to summon all his inner strength and courage 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, Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the meaning of masculinity, the push and pull of family, the violence faced by so many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.

Young Mungo

Sarah Christine Gill

A sharp wind blew across the loch and snapped the fabric of his cagoule in its hurry. The air was clearer than he had ever tasted, and when Gallowgate wasn't watching, he tilted his head back and put his tongue out into the breeze. It tasted green like spring grass, but there was a prehistoric brownnes to it, as though it had searched an entire age through damp peaty glens and ancient forests, looking for its way to wherever it was going. 

If he had known the words to describe it, he would have said he could smell the tang of the pine forests, the bright snap of bog myrtle, vetch, and gorse, and then underneath it all, the damp musk of dark fertile soil, the cleansing rain that never ceased. But to Mungo, it was green and it was brown and it was damp and it was clean. He had no words for it. It just smelled like magic. 

sina (she/her) 

Neglectful eating and hard drinking had withered and jaundiced him. There was too much skin over too little fat, his yellow face wrinkling like an overripe apple.

It was a funny thing to be a disappointment because you were honest and assumed others might be too. The games people played made his head hurt. 

It was a burden to have a trusting soul. Sometimes she just couldn't believe the worst in people.

She had asked for violence out of a gentle soul and it made her feel like she had trampled a patch of fresh snow.

It was a nothing that felt like an everything. 

Here was yet another person telling him what he needed, how he should act, the person he should be. Another person who didn't think he was enough just as he was.

It was the most degrading thing that could happen to a fighting man: to be so publicly skinned by a girl. 

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