Love and Social Decay
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YOUNG MUNGO
by Douglas Stuart
Grove Press. 400 pages, $27.

TWO NOVELS published in the span of two years have made 46-year-old Scottish-American Douglas Stuart a writer to be reckoned with. He labored quietly for ten years on his first, Shuggie Bain, a heart-rending portrait of a mother and son published in 2020, and then began his second, the recently published Young Mungo. Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize, making Stuart only the second Scot to win the prestigious international award (James Kelman being the first, in 1994). Stuart’s work has garnered glittering reviews on both sides of the Atlantic; Shuggie Bain has been called “the most globally significant Scottish cultural phenomenon since the mid-1990s successes of Trainspotting and Braveheart.”

Thomas Keith edits the Tennessee Williams titles for New Directions Publishing and co-edited Williams’ letters for W. W. Norton.