Young Mungo – Stuart Douglas (2022)

Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize-winning second novel is a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a suspenseful story of the dangerous first love between two young men, Mungo and James. Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in the hyper-masculine, violently sectarian world of Glasgow’s housing estates, where they should be sworn enemies if they are to be seen as men at all. Instead, they become best friends, finding sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote James has built for his prize racing birds. As they fall in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from everyone around him, especially his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. The threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable. When Mungo’s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter conceals murky pasts, he must summon all his strength and courage to return to safety, where he and James might still have a future. With rich lyricism and a full voice for people rarely acknowledged in literary fiction, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the limits of masculinity, the pull of family, the violence faced by many queer people and the dangers of loving someone too much.