Young Mungo
by Douglas Stuart
Narrated by Chris Reilly
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Pub Date Apr 05 2022 | Archive Date Apr 07 2022
RB Media | Recorded Books
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Description
A story of queer love and working-class families, Young Mungo is the brilliant second novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain.
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. Published or forthcoming in forty territories, it has sold more than one million copies worldwide. Now Stuart returns with Young Mungo, his extraordinary second novel. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
Advance Praise
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Time, Vogue, Guardian, Entertainment Weekly, Irish Times, Kirkus Reviews, and Literary Hub
“The Sighthill tenement where Shuggie Bain, Stuart’s Booker Prize–winning debut, unfurled is glimpsed in his follow-up, set in the 1990s in an adjacent neighborhood. You wouldn’t think you’d be eager to return to these harsh, impoverished environs, but again this author creates characters so vivid, dilemmas so heart-rending, and dialogue so brilliant that the whole thing sucks you in like a vacuum cleaner . . . Romantic, terrifying, brutal, tender, and, in the end, sneakily hopeful. What a writer.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The astonishing sophomore effort from Booker Prize winner Stuart details a teen’s hard life in north Glasgow in the post-Thatcher years . . . Stuart’s writing is stellar . . . He’s too fine a storyteller to go for a sentimental ending, and the final act leaves the reader gutted. This is unbearably sad, more so because the reader comes to cherish the characters their creator has brought to life. It’s a sucker punch to the heart.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A searing, gorgeously written portrait of a young gay boy trying to be true to himself in a place and time that demands conformity to social and gender rules . . . Stuart’s tale could be set anywhere that poverty, socioeconomic inequality, or class struggles exist, which is nearly everywhere. But it is also about the narrowness and failure of vision in a place where individuals cannot imagine a better life, where people have never been outside their own neighborhood . . . Stuart’s prize-winning, best-selling debut, Shuggie Bain, ensures great enthusiasm for his second novel of young, dangerous love.” —Booklist (starred review)
“After the splendid Shuggie Bain, Stuart continues his examination of 1980s Glaswegian working-class life and a son’s attachment to an alcohol-ravaged mother, with results as good yet distinctly different . . . In language crisper and more direct than Shuggie Bain’s, if still spiked with startling similes, Stuart heightens his exploration of the sibling bond and the inexplicable hatred between Glasgow’s Protestants and Catholics, while contrasting Mungo’s tenderly conveyed queer awakening with the awful counterpart of sexual violence. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal (starred review)
“Readers will be happy to learn that Stuart’s follow-up, Young Mungo, is even stronger than his first book . . . A marvelous feat of storytelling, a mix of tender emotion and grisly violence that finds humanity in even the most fraught circumstances.” —BookPage (starred review)
Available Editions
| EDITION | Audiobook, Unabridged |
| ISBN | 9781705056554 |
| PRICE | $29.99 (USD) |
| DURATION | 14 Hours, 30 Minutes |
Featured Reviews
Sidney N, Reviewer
I’ve been at a loss for how to talk about this book for a few days. It’s a lot of things to me: Being soft as a tremendous act of courage—it hurts so much more, but isn’t the world more beautiful? Grimy streets, city drinking, words that are sharp because it distracts from everything else. Post-Thatcher Glasgow is the world because you were never supposed to see the outside of it. Julien Baker’s “Relative Fiction”—“Do I get callous or do I stay tender / Which is worse and which is better?” It’s about being vulnerable, about being poor, about the life sentence your circumstances can be, about anger and rage. And a lot about love, or the lack thereof.
Stuart’s prose is really really evocative—really poetic in its most lush moments, and absolutely gut-punching in its darkest, most horrifying moments. There are moments you’re made to feel disgusted, distraught, furious—but there are also those quiet moments of hope, when people dare to be more than everything around them. It was hard to read quite often but the dark only makes the hope of the book so much more miraculous.
The audiobook of this was phenomenal, and the narrator Chris Reilly does an excellent job delivering on all of the Glaswegian dialect. I’ve had his accent embedded in my head for days, just a Scottish brogue narrating my internal monologue. I really felt like it brought to life these characters and the way they speak more than it could have on the page.
This book impacted me deeply and a lot of that comes from heavy subject matter. For those interested in the book, please be aware of these CONTENT WARNINGS: violence, domestic violence, homophobia, sexual assault/rape, pedophilia, alcoholism.
Thank you so so much to Netgalley and the publisher for this ARC in exchange for a review. <3
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