Young Mungo

Reviews / Votes

A touching story of forbidden love pursued in the face of sectarian violence with a plot that unfolds with all the urgency and dread of teenage yearning * The Times/The Sunday Times, 'Books of the Year' * Stuart follows his Booker-winning Shuggie Bain with another tale of a Glasgow boy whose mother is an alcoholic. This time, however, it's a love story, with Protestant-Catholic sectarian tensions in the background; Mungo and pigeon-fancier James are star-crossed lovers in a Jets and Sharks world. The tension of their romance is expertly sustained. * The Daily Telegraph, 'Books of the Year' * Again Douglas Stuart proves himself a wonderfully gifted writer . . . Young Mungo is the work of a true novelist. * The Guardian * A dazzling modern masterpiece . . . a book of clear, honest, often dazzling intent and integrity * Evening Standard * The profundity of Stuart's exceptional writing comes, then, partly from his commitment to the truth that even amid deprivation, compassion persists. This is most fully and beautifully expressed in the relationship between Mungo and his fellow lonely adolescent Catholic James . . . It is no exaggeration to say that I read the final pages through floods of breathless tears. * Independent * There are sentences here that gleam and shimmer, demanding to be read and reread for their beauty and their truth . . . I sobbed my way through Shuggie Bain and sobbed again as Young Mungo made its way towards an ending whose inevitability only serves to heighten its tragedy. * The Observer * Stuart [is] a virtuoso describer with a more or less infinite supply of tender detail and elegant phrasing . . . Mungo's predicament is piercing, and as the story draws to a close, a spectral beauty prevails. * The Guardian * Captures a world of suffering and sectarian violence with writing of transcendent beauty * Financial Times * A rich and affecting group portrait of loneliness. Every character . . . is horribly alone . . . Stuart's book feels richly abundant. It spills over with colourful characters and even more colourful insults. And like a Dickens novel it has a moral vision that's expansive and serious while being savagely funny. * The Sunday Times * Young Mungo seals it: Douglas Stuart is a genius . . . [He] writes like an angel. * The Washington Post * If you adored Shuggie Bain . . . Young Mungo will please you on every page. If you didn't, what's wrong with you? * Los Angeles Times * Stuart writes beautifully, with marvelous attunement to the poetry in the unlovely and the mundane . . . The novel conveys an enveloping sense of place, in part through the wit and musicality of its dialogue. * The New York Times *