Young Mungo

November 1, 2021

After his Booker Prize-winning, one-million-plus-copy best-selling Shuggie Bain, Stuart returns with another largescale tale of queer love and working-class life; young Mungo might be Shuggie's second cousin. Growing up in Glasgow, where religious differences and swaggering masculine prerogative really matter, the Protestant Mungo should not be friends with the Catholic James. But they bond over the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds, a sanctuary for them as well as their feathered friends, and eventually they fall in love. For their safety, they must keep their love quiet from everyone around them, especially Mungo's gang-leading brother Hamish, and Mungo's true grit is tested when his mother sends him on a fishing trip with two shady, whiskey-guzzling men. Will he ever get back to James? And do they have a future? Five years in the making.

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Starred review from February 14, 2022
The astonishing sophomore effort from Booker Prize winner Stuart (Shuggie Bain) details a teen’s hard life in north Glasgow in the post-Thatcher years. Mungo is 15, the youngest of three Protestant siblings growing up in one of the city’s poverty-stricken “schemes.” The children’s alcoholic mother leaves them periodically for a married man with children of his own. Mungo’s father is long gone, and Mungo’s sister, Jodie, looks after their household as best she can. Hamish, Mungo’s hooligan brother and ringleader of a gang of Protestant Billy Boys, is a constant threat to Mungo, who, tender of heart and profoundly lonely, is at the mercy of his violent moods. Even after Mungo meets the kindred James, a Catholic boy who keeps pigeons, he is overwhelmed by his self-loathing, assuming all the calamity around him is somehow his fault. He doesn’t have a clue what it is he wants. All he knows is that amid the blood and alcohol and spittle-sprayed violence of his daily existence, James is a gentle, calming respite. Their friendship is the center of this touching novel, but it also leads to a terrifying and tragic intervention. Stuart’s writing is stellar—a man’s voice sounds “like he had a throatful of dry toast”; a boy has “ribs like the hull of an upturned boat.” He’s too fine a storyteller to go for a sentimental ending, and the final act leaves the reader gutted. This is unbearably sad, more so because the reader comes to cherish the characters their creator has brought to life. It’s a sucker punch to the heart. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners.

Starred review from February 1, 2022

After the splendid Shuggie Bain, Stuart continues his examination of 1980s Glaswegian working-class life and a son's attachment to an alcohol-ravaged mother, with results as good yet distinctly different; this is not a sequel. Here, Mo-Maw has abandoned her children in a self-pitying bid for her own happiness while 15-year-old Mungo is better able to articulate his own roiling emotions than the younger Shuggie. With big-hearted older sister Jodie, Mungo lives in a council flat they'll soon lose if Mo-Maw doesn't show up. He's fearful that his brother, Hamish, will drag him into the "Proddy" (Protestant) gang he commands with ruthless authority and even more fearful that Hamish will discover the relationship he's stumbled into with genial, pigeon-tending James, not only because being queer is considered contemptible but because James is Catholic. Meanwhile, an in-and-out-the-door Mo-Maw sends Mungo on a fishing trip with two shady men she barely knows, thinking to make a man of him; anticipating the outcome of these twinned storylines makes for anxious, propulsive reading. VERDICT In language crisper and more direct than Shuggie Bain's, if still spiked with startling similes, Stuart heightens his exploration of the sibling bond and the inexplicable hatred between Glasgow's Protestants and Catholics, while contrasting Mungo's tenderly conveyed queer awakening with the awful counterpart of sexual violence. Highly recommended.--Barbara Hoffert

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from January 15, 2022
Two 15-year-old Glasgow boys, one Protestant and one Catholic, share a love against all odds. The Sighthill tenement where Shuggie Bain (2020), Stuart's Booker Prize-winning debut, unfurled is glimpsed in his follow-up, set in the 1990s in an adjacent neighborhood. You wouldn't think you'd be eager to return to these harsh, impoverished environs, but again this author creates characters so vivid, dilemmas so heart-rending, and dialogue so brilliant that the whole thing sucks you in like a vacuum cleaner. As the book opens, Mungo's hard-drinking mother, Mo-Maw, is making a rare appearance at the flat where Mungo lives with his 16-year-old sister, Jodie. Jodie has full responsibility for the household, as their older brother, Hamish, a Proddy warlord, lives with the 15-year-old mother of his child and her parents. Mo-Maw's come by only to pack her gentle son off on a manly fishing trip with two disreputable strangers. Though everything about these men is alarming to Mungo, "fifteen years he had lived and breathed in Scotland, and he had never seen a glen, a loch, a forest, or a ruined castle." So at least there's that to look forward to. This ultracreepy weekend plays out over the course of the book, interleaved with the events of the months before. Mungo has met a neighbor boy named James, who keeps racing pigeons in a "doocot"; the boys are kindred spirits and offer each other a tenderness utterly absent from any other part of their lives. But a same-sex relationship across the sectarian divide is so unthinkable that their every interaction is laced with fear. Even before Hamish gets wind of these goings-on, he too has decided to make Mungo a man, forcing him to participate in a West Side Story-type gang battle. As in Shuggie Bain, the yearning for a mother's love is omnipresent, even on the battlefield. "They kept their chests puffed out until they could be safe in their mammies' arms again; where they could coorie into her side as she watched television and she would ask, 'What is all this, eh, what's with all these cuddles?' and they would say nothing, desperate to just be boys again, wrapped up safe in her softness." Romantic, terrifying, brutal, tender, and, in the end, sneakily hopeful. What a writer.

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Starred review from February 1, 2022
St. Mungo is the patron saint of Glasgow, and in Stuart's second novel--after Booker Prize-winning Shuggie Bain (2020)--Mungo is also a 15-year-old living in Glasgow, the youngest son of an alcoholic mother. Mungo would do anything "just to make other people feel better." He is a gentle soul living in an environment of toxic masculinity, sectarian violence, and drink, but, as we learn, he has strong reserves of strength that he himself doesn't know he possesses. Love for another young man would be risky, but when Mungo, a Protestant, falls in love with James, a Catholic, the peril is immense. This is a searing, gorgeously written portrait of a young gay boy trying to be true to himself in a place and time that demands conformity to social and gender rules. Many details are specific to Glasgow, but the broader implications are universal. Stuart's tale could be set anywhere that poverty, socioeconomic inequality, or class struggles exist, which is nearly everywhere. But it is also about the narrowness and failure of vision in a place where individuals cannot imagine a better life, where people have never been outside their own neighborhood. "I've never even seen sheep before," Mungo says at one point. Like James Kelman, Stuart has put working-class Glasgow on the literary map.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Stuart's prize-winning, best-selling debut, Shuggie Bain, ensures great enthusiasm for his second novel of young, dangerous love.

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