The Glasgow of Douglas Stuart hasn’t changed. It’s the same city that Shuggie Bain (of 2021 Booker Prize winning fame) grew up in: alcohol-soaked adults; absent fathers; crime; teenage pregnancies and flashpoints of violence. This is an aggressively heteronormative community – there’s no safe place for an adolescent like Mungo Hamilton to question his own sexuality.

The Hamiltons are a microcosm of the Glaswegian working poor at the time of Thatcher’s prime ministership. Mum, Maureen – or Mo-Maw as she prefers to be called – is an alcoholic, and absent parent. There is no dad. Hamish, aka HaHa, is the eldest boy and leader of a gang of Protestant youths terrorising the Catholics and local businesses, while selling drugs to finance his lifestyle. Daughter, Jodie, is still at school, runs the house in Mo-Maw’s absence and has dreams of going to university. She’s also having sex with one of her teachers. Mungo, named after Glasgow’s patron saint, is the antithesis of HaHa: sweet-natured and same-sex attracted. There’s a sense of the Montagues and Capulets as Mungo’s affections land on James, a young Catholic boy.

The book is divided into before and after an incident involving a battered Mungo. Mungo’s home life, coercion into gang violence and James are covered in the ‘before’ chapters. The ‘after’ ones see Mungo going to a remote loch with two men. In their company, Mungo is extremely vulnerable.

The Glasgow Stuart paints is a coal-black wasteland. There are flickers of hope amid the desolation, but the mood is still overwhelmingly bleak.

Reviewed by Bob Moore

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American writer and fashion designer. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, he studied at the Scottish College of Textiles and London’s Royal College of Art, before moving at the age of 24 to New York City, where he built a successful career in fashion design, while also beginning to write.