“Mungo Hamilton, a fifteen-year-old gay Protestant boy in 1990s Glasgow, falls in love with James Jamieson, a sixteen-year-old Catholic boy who keeps doves on the East End housing-scheme rooftops.”
What's in this book
- Douglas Stuart's 2022 second novel — a Protestant boy and a Catholic boy fall in love in 1990s sectarian Glasgow
- Structural Stuart follow-up to Shuggie Bain
- 400 pages cross-cutting Mungo-and-James Glasgow chapters with embedded Loch Lomond fishing-trip chapters
- Mungo Hamilton is fifteen; James Jamieson sixteen with rooftop doves
- Angus King audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Shuggie Bain, A Little Life, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and contemporary queer literary fiction
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Young Mungo is Douglas Stuart's 2022 second novel, the structural follow-up to Shuggie Bain (2020, Booker Prize) and the work that continued Stuart's broader literary-fiction project about 1980s and 1990s working-class Glasgow. The structural premise is Mungo Hamilton, a fifteen-year-old gay Protestant boy in 1990s East End Glasgow, falling in love with James Jamieson, a sixteen-year-old Catholic boy who keeps doves on the roof of the housing-scheme building next to Mungo's. The novel cross-cuts the Mungo-and-James present-tense Glasgow chapters with the embedded Loch Lomond fishing-trip chapters in which Mungo has been sent by his alcoholic mother Mo-Maw on a redemptive-camping-trip with two strangers from her Alcoholics Anonymous group across the contemporary frame of the novel.
Stuart's structural method is the patient cross-cutting between the chronological Mungo-and-James Glasgow chapters and the embedded Loch Lomond fishing-trip chapters, with the Glasgow chapters providing the structural emotional engine of the broader love-and-sectarianism narrative and the Loch Lomond chapters providing the structural threat-and-danger narrative that the contemporary frame requires. The Hamilton-family ensemble (Mo-Maw, the older brother Hamish who runs the local Protestant teenage gang, the older sister Jodie navigating her own escape) is rendered in the patient close-third-person Mungo narration with the kind of patient Glasgow-specific sociological texture that Stuart established in Shuggie Bain. The novel's structural argument (about how the operational mechanics of 1990s sectarian Glasgow produced specific kinds of queer-Protestant-Catholic adolescent love that the broader contemporary literary tradition has not historically committed to) is made through the texture of the Mungo-and-James chapters rather than through any direct argument.
Recommended as required contemporary British literary fiction reading, as the structural Stuart follow-up to Shuggie Bain, and for fans of Shuggie Bain, A Little Life, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and contemporary queer literary fiction. Compare to the broader Stuart catalog and contemporary British literary fiction. The Angus King audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
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