Douglas stuart mungo5/19/2023 ![]() ![]() But a same-sex relationship across the sectarian divide is so unthinkable that their every interaction is laced with fear. Mungo has met a neighbor boy named James, who keeps racing pigeons in a "doocot" the boys are kindred spirits and offer each other a tenderness utterly absent from any other part of their lives. This ultracreepy weekend plays out over the course of the book, interleaved with the events of the months before. ![]() Though everything about these men is alarming to Mungo, "fifteen years he had lived and breathed in Scotland, and he had never seen a glen, a loch, a forest, or a ruined castle." So at least there's that to look forward to. Mo-Maw's come by only to pack her gentle son off on a manly fishing trip with two disreputable strangers. Jodie has full responsibility for the household, as their older brother, Hamish, a Proddy warlord, lives with the 15-year-old mother of his child and her parents. As the book opens, Mungo's hard-drinking mother, Mo-Maw, is making a rare appearance at the flat where Mungo lives with his 16-year-old sister, Jodie. 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. The Sighthill tenement where Shuggie Bain (2020), Stuart's Booker Prize–winning debut, unfurled is glimpsed in his follow-up, set in the 1990s in an adjacent neighborhood. Two 15-year-old Glasgow boys, one Protestant and one Catholic, share a love against all odds. ![]()
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