We’re getting a new Douglas Stuart book, Young Mungo, in April 2022.
Fresh off Shuggie Bain’s Booker win, Douglas Stuart has announced his new novel, Young Mungo, is forthcoming from Grove (US), Knopf Canada, and Picador (UK), in April 2022.
Aside from having an incredibly sticky title, Young Mungo is promised to be a wrenching love story set against the working-class housing estates on Glasgow’s East End. Reads the synopsis, in part:
Five years in the writing, Young Mungo 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: Mungo and James. Born under different stars—Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic—they should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all. Their environment is a hyper-masculine and sectarian one, for gangs of young men and the violence they might dole out dominate the Glaswegian estate where they live. And yet against all odds Mungo and James become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds . . . Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the push and pull of family, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.
Said Stuart himself in a video for Waterstones Bookstore and on Twitter, “Young Mungo was a book that I actually began writing long before Shuggie was published and finished before Shuggie was nominated for the Booker, so I hope you’ll find it comes from that very personal space . . . I hope you love Mungo and the dysfunctional Hamilton family as much as I do.”
