GREAT DIVIDES

The author of Shuggie Bain delivers a gritty but tender story of young love in a city where sexual and religious boundaries are set in stone.

- KIRAN DASS

YOUNG MUNGO, by Douglas Stuart (Picador, $38) is published next week.

Four years before Douglas Stuart published his debut novel, Shuggie Bain, which won the Booker Prize in 2020, he had begun writing another novel. That book was Young Mungo. A coming-of-age story of forbidden love, it shares the same tender-hearted raw power, brutality and austere working-class Glaswegian backdrop as Shuggie Bain, but Stuart shifts his close exploration of the relationship dynamic between mother and son to queer love and the lasting hurt caused when men are told to "man up".

Young Mungo is set around dreich streets and a sandstone tenement housing estate in 1990s Glasgow. Named after the melancholy patron saint of Glasgow, Saint Kentigern, also known as Saint Mungo, 15-year-old Mungo Hamilton is a sweet boy who is full of love and would do anything to make other people feel better. His gentleness puts people on edge.

In Shuggie, Stuart created an unforgettable character, and in Mungo he has crafted another.