JOHN OF JOHN

In Scotland’s Hebrides islands, a closeted gay man returns home to an insular community of sheep farmers and weavers, where complications and secrets await.

Stuart follows his Booker Prize–winning debut, Shuggie Bain (2020), and acclaimed second novel, Young Mungo (2022), both set in Glasgow, with a coming-of-age story set in a very different part of Scotland. John-Calum Macleod has left art school in Edinburgh, broke and without prospects, called home to the Isle of Harris by his father because his grandmother is unwell. Ella, his mother’s mother, lives with her former son-in-law on his croft while her remarried daughter lives elsewhere with her husband and younger children. The reason for this unusual arrangement will become clear slowly, along with other key issues: Why Cal’s father, also named John, a pillar of the extremely conservative local Presbyterian church, is so tortured; what led to the end of his marriage; whether Cal’s attempts to hide his sexuality from everyone except the neighbor boy who used to be his lover have been successful. When that boy, Doll Macdonald, gives Cal an icy cold shoulder upon his return, his attention falls on his father’s best friend, Innes MacInnes, a never-married man who lives with his own ancient, infirm father and emotionally estranged brother. Could Innes possibly be gay? Cal wonders. The 22-year-old Cal exists at the confluence of two profoundly different cultures. On the one hand, he speaks Gaelic with his father, works nights weaving traditional tweed on their loom, helps with the sheep, and attends his father’s evangelical church. On the other, he takes ecstasy, goes to a booze- and sex-focused hullabaloo on a party bus, tries to find a hook-up in the personal ads (it seems to be the 1990s). The central question of the book, which is facing all the main characters, is whether it’s possible to inhabit the place one calls home as one’s genuine self. Stay or go? Life or death? By the end, this issue is resolved in a variety of tragic and hopeful ways.

With his gift for creating vibrantly specific characters and settings, Stuart again taps profound human truth.