He would do anything just to make other people feel better. As his mother watched him through the ear-of-wheat pattern of the net curtains, she tried to convince herself that his twitch was a happy wink, a lovely Morse code that telegraphed everything would be okay. Turning back, Mungo squinted up at the tenement flat, and his eyes began to twitch with one of their nervous spasms.
It was such an assertive gesture that it took everyone by surprise. Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in the literary world, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.Īs they neared the corner, Mungo halted and shrugged the man's hand from his shoulder. And when several months later Mungo's mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future. As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold.
Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars-Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic-and they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Both a page-turner and literary tour de force, it is a vivid portrayal of working-class life and a deeply moving and highly suspenseful story of the dangerous first love of two young men. Now Stuart returns with Young Mungo, his extraordinary second novel.
Published or forthcoming in forty territories, it has sold more than one million copies worldwide. Douglas Stuart's first novel Shuggie Bain, winner of the 2020 Booker Prize, is one of the most successful literary debuts of the century so far.
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