Young Mungo: The No. 1 Sunday Times Bestseller

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When you lose your parents at an early age, you lose most of your possessions, so I don’t really attach value to things. He's simply clueless, he lacks a kind of inner compass that warns a person away from impulsive action. Is it haunted by the blood and violence that stalked its streets and took place behind closed doors?

Stuart’s characters are vivid and heart-breaking, from delicate cameos like Poor Wee Chickie to Ha-Ha, Jodie and, of course, Mungo and James.She wants to be alone, to get her funtimes with a new man, so off she packs Mungo (freshly beaten by Hamish for the James-loving faggot that he is) off with. There are many touching scenes with Shuggie and it primarily focuses on his perspective, but it's really the story of his mum Agnes.

There are sentences here that gleam and shimmer, demanding to be read and reread for their beauty and their truth . In third-person novels, a great deal rides on formulations that present thought and speech without accompanying quotation marks. I loved those first moments when Mungo and James comforted each other, and they made me forget the darkness and the heartbreaking moments for a while.Then he meets James Jamieson – a slightly older Catholic boy whose flat backs on to his but who he first meets on a waste ground where Jamie has a doocot (a pigeon shed). I also enjoyed the structure and how well Stuart navigates between the two timeframes, bringing them beautifully together for a final chapter that is nothing less than devastating, yet hopeful. I’m not sure if it would have been better to read than listen to it, but it was not an enjoyable audio experience. He's got everything it takes to have a long, exceptional career, so why not be bolder in the choices he makes?

The summary of my review (a tweet of which the BBC featured on their live page minutes after the winner announcement) was that it was a “desperately moving, heartbreaking book: one which places hope and despair, love and brokenness on the same page, treating them with equal weight and empathy.he] was her mother’s minor moon, her warmest sun, and at the exact same time, a tiny satellite that she had forgotten about. In 2020, he published his first novel, Shuggie Bain, which won the Booker prize as well as both debut of the year and book of the year at the British Book awards in 2021.

He even wonders why he is hearing “about this one particular son out of the four sons he said he had”.

So different from all the others in that masculine working-class environment in Glasgow, a city split between Catholics and Protestants. Douglas Stuart’s second novel appears hard on the heels of 2020’s Shuggie Bain, a Booker prize winner with strong claims to instant-classic status, and is similar in a number of ways. After the extraordinary success of Shuggie Bain, his second novel, Young Mungo, is another beautiful and moving book, a gay Romeo and Juliet set in the brutal world of Glasgow’s housing estates. But if Stuart has not departed much from the scaffolding of his debut novel, he has managed to produce a story with a very different shape and pace. The woman excuses her husband’s appalling conduct because she loves him – much like the Hamilton siblings with Mo-Maw (“If anybody should understand .