Douglas Stuart admits he was a bit nervous about publishing his second novel, Young Mungo, following the incredible success of his debut, Shuggie Bain, which won the 2020 Booker Prize.

“I began writing this book in 2016, so I’ve been carrying it inside me for many years now,” Stuart says in an email exchange from his longtime home in New York City. “There’s a real relief in releasing characters into the world and finally being able to talk to readers about them.”

The Scottish-American writer returns to the streets of Glasgow for his latest story, where 15-year-old Mungo Hamilton lives in a tenement with his sister and Mo-Maw, his absentee, alcoholic mother. His older brother is a gang leader who lives with the young mother of his child, and whose violence-laced visits spur the facial tics that plague young Mungo.

The novel, which came out April 4, begins with Mungo, named for a saint by his very unsaintly mother, being shooed off on a weekend camping trip with two shady male strangers after one of Mo-Maw’s increasingly rare appearances in his life. The story unfolds along two timelines: the camping weekend in May and, in January, Mungo’s blossoming romance with James Jamieson, a Catholic boy from a neighbouring tenement.

“It’s a book about many things: a dangerous first love, motherless sons, and the difficult journey those sons undertake in becoming men,” Stuart says. “It is about how we care for one another, and how sometimes we are abandoned by those who should be caring for us.”

 

At its heart, Young Mungo is a romance between two poor young men in the east end of Glasgow, the neighbourhood Stuart brought to life with such aching beauty in Shuggie Bain. It is 1993, just after Thatcherism has ended in the United Kingdom, and unemployment is high. Homosexuality is taboo, not to mention love that crosses religious lines, as Mungo is a Protestant and James is a Catholic.

A softhearted boy in a hard world, Mungo tries to fit in, and fails. At one point, his brother forces Mungo to take part in a brawl between the Protestant and Catholic gangs in an effort to “make a man” out of him.

“One of the hooded Billies turned his way, taking a long draw on his fag. ‘Ah see we finally got young Hamilton out here. Bout time, shitebag.’ The man’s mouth was a collection of broken teeth. He had a grin like a graveyard full of wrecked headstones. ‘Ah thought ye were gonnae let the family name doon. Turn out to be a fuckin’ bender [homosexual].’”

Stuart says the novel was inspired by his lonely coming of age, a time when he “longed for a love like the one Mungo and James discover,” but there was no gay visibility. “I had also been reflecting on masculinity, and what it means to be a man, and to ‘man up’. I grew up in a working-class neighbourhood that was decimated by mass unemployment. The men around me expressed their masculinity in quite a rigid, stoic way and they never expressed their fears or their vulnerabilities. They built their reputations through hard work, hard drinking, and hard fighting. I always felt so on the outside of that traditional male culture and spent most of my youth desperate to fit in.”

Although he lives in New York, Stuart says Glasgow is still home, and he visits several times a year “just to feel like myself again.” His childhood in the city left an indelible mark, he says, and inspires all his writing.

“The Glasgow of my youth was a city of wild contradictions, a place of enormous compassion, humour and humanity, but a place shaped by tough times and violence, too,” he says. “It’s a very diverse city, with extreme wealth, amazing culture, and fine historical universities, but it’s known for its proud working class.”

The era of Thatcher’s union-busting economic policies left the industrial city of Glasgow with widespread unemployment, and “my family were torn asunder by that,” says Stuart.

When he grew up in the 80s, it was a bleak time for queer youth no matter where they were in the world. “As a young man grappling with my queerness and feelings of isolation, I could never have imagined all the love that would one day come into my life,” he says. “The real poison of homophobia is that it makes the young person hate themselves. My self-loathing was really toxic.”

Events unfold in Young Mungo that are hard to read, more so because Mungo is rendered so beautifully on the page. He suffers, greatly, and his story weighs on the reader, but the novel is not without hope.

If Stuart could talk to his 16-year-old self, he would tell him how much he would be loved one day. And to enjoy his hair.

“I would tell him to experiment with every hairstyle he could imagine, and to do it quickly!” says the bald author.

The success of Shuggie Bain allowed Stuart to leave his first career as a successful fashion designer and focus on writing. He is now at work on his third novel, as well as a screenplay of Shuggie Bain for the BBC. He was initially hesitant about translating the novel he worked on for 10 years for the small screen, but decided to go for it.

“Television was so important to me as a young boy. We didn’t have any books at home and so I felt there were people who might never read Shuggie Bain, but who would appreciate the story if they saw it on the screen.”