Young Mungo

This is a raw tale told against the backdrop on 1980s Glasgow. It cleverly uses two timelines to converge at one important event, while Douglas Stuart's prose helps you feel, taste, sense this dysfunctional family and a society with underlying violence.

I couldn’t stop reading. It’s a raw, gritty, and unflinching story of a teenage boy who finds forbidden love against the odds in a deprived area of Glasgow.

The two boys are divided by so much that a future seems impossible. The world the author describes is both beautiful and ugly and the camping trip just about broke my heart. I was just enthralled the whole way through. The ending isn’t as unclear as some think, at least not to me. I closed the book with a smile on my face.

It feels wrong to enjoy a book like this… show more.

Set in 1990s working-class Glasgow, Young Mungo depicts a queer love story blossoming against the rising tensions of religious clashes, gang wars, and class struggles.

Tenderly written and brilliantly paced, the novel also depicts one of the most beautiful sibling relationships. Watch for: the two gangs (one protestant and the other catholic) facing off on a historic bridge in Glasgow and the scene where Mungo meets James in, wait for it, a dovecote.

This book was so good I immediately read it a second time. First, I read it for the story, then for the beauty of Stuart’s writing. 

Although the novel is set in Glasgow and I grew up in rural Nebraska, I related to the young Mungo in so many ways. He grew up poor in a single-parent home. Hyper-masculine values dominated, and he was confused and frightened by his romantic interest in another boy. 

It is a story of the bounds of masculinity, the push from and pull toward one’s home, and the dangers of loving another man. The story… show more.