Young Mungo, Douglas Stuart
‘Violence always preceded affection; Mungo didn’t know any other way.’
Acclaimed Scottish author Douglas Stuart has an unparalleled ability to blend grit and beauty in his linguistic prose. In his second novel, Young Mungo, Stuart returns again to the east end of Glasgow, to streets filled with violence, addiction and unhappy childhoods. While the novel at first feels very similar to Shuggie Bain - in its setting, focus on alcoholism, the shadowy echoes of Shuggie’s relationship with his mother, the intensely felt local dialect - the novel gradually diverges away from its Booker-winning predecessor as the narrative deepens. If anything, this is more of a love story, containing glimmers of hope in its weighty pages.
Young Mungo interchanges between Mungo’s life in Glasgow, as a friendship-cum-romance blooms with pigeon-keeping catholic James, and a weekend-long trip to a remote loch with two alcoholic sex offenders (as you can imagine, not light reading) sometime later, following the discovery of his sexuality by his overbearing and brutally violent older brother, Hamish. The novel is a moving literary triumph, a piercing navigation of sexuality, class, family and escape for teens growing up on the council estates of Glasgow’s east end, hoping for a better life.
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