It is sometimes used to separate young, working-class Glaswegian men into tribes. Religion is closely tied to identity in the city.
Mungo is named for Glasgow’s patron saint, and as Stuart says, “Saint Mungo was as important to the writing of Young Mungo as Saint Agnes was to Shuggie Bain. Set in Glasgow in 1992, it evokes the religious turmoil between Catholics and Protestants in Scotland’s largest city, pummeled by the iron fist of Margaret Thatcher’s fiscal policies, perpetuating a vicious code of behavior among young working-class men. Young Mungo recasts Romeo and Juliet with two teenaged boys as the leads, but the novel is also a broader social canvas. And with a gay love story at its heart, Young Mungo is a more explicitly queer book than Shuggie-Douglas writes about how Mungo and James fall in love with a tenderness that is deeply moving.” It’s a beautiful novel about family love and the dangers of being different in a violent, hyper-masculine world. As his editor, Peter Blackstock, notes, “ Young Mungo is an extraordinary novel, a book that will live up to the very high expectations set by Shuggie Bain-and even exceed them. citizenship and was thus eligible for both accolades he lives with his husband in Manhattan.) There’s no sophomore slump here: Young Mungo is, if anything, a richer story, confirming Stuart’s emerging status as a consummate stylist. A finalist for the National Book Award, it won the prestigious Booker Prize. Stuart’s debut, Shuggie Bain, hit readers and critics like a thunderbolt out of a blue sky, a piercing portrait of an impoverished boyhood in 1980s Glasgow and the protagonist’s struggles with an alcoholic mother. The spare yet elegant composition-an adolescent boy photographed from underwater, his face bisected by the waterline, mouth and nose immersed-suggests an innocent adrift in an undertow, not waving but drowning. In an exclusive announcement, Oprah Daily is revealing the new cover for Douglas Stuart’s second novel, Young Mungo, which Grove Press is publishing in April 2022.
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