THIS WEEK
Country Focus: Scotland Author Profile
After winning the biggest prize in English-language fiction with his début, Douglas Stuart returns with a scintillating Glasgow-set companion
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Tom Tivnan @tomtivnan
08 18th February 2022
t’s not quite the proverbial waiting for a bus for ages and three come along at once, but we are geting a new Douglas Stuart novel a scant two years aſter his début. This is a sharpish turnaround, as Stuart famously worked for a decade on what would turn out to be his Booker- winning bow Shuggie Bain—along the way enduring what could have been soul-destroying amounts of rejection, with his manuscript being knocked back by publishers 44 times (32 from the US and 12 from the UK, if you are keeping score). Stuart’s second, Young Mungo (Picador), launches in April and it has some similar themes to Shuggie Bain, as it takes place in working-class Glasgow, with an alcoholic mother, and it explores queerness in a seting where it is dangerous to be different. The book revolves around the titular teenage Mungo, and James, his friend and then lover. Mungo and James’ relationship must stay secret and not just because they are gay: we are in the early 1990s Glaswegian housing schemes, riven by violent
sectarianism, and Mungo is Protestant, James a Catholic. This is further complicated as Mungo’s older brother Hamish is a fearsome local gang leader (think a more calculating Begbie) with a reputation to uphold. It is a deſt, beautiful star-crossed lovers story with propulsively page-turning suspense, as for Mungo and James the threat of discovery remains ever-present. To my mind, it is even beter than Shuggie Bain and feels like the maturation of an artist at the height of his powers. But I discover maturation is not quite right. Stuart tells me, over Zoom from his home in Manhatan’s East Village, that he started Young Mungo before he completed Shuggie Bain. He says: “Shuggie took so long because he kept going up to the top corner of my desk between draſts. I lost count of how many draſts he took, but certainly well into the double digits. But I actually started Mungo in 2016 and probably completed a lot of it before I published Shuggie. The process was that I didn’t quite know where Shuggie was going, so between draſts I would move him to the top
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