Books Written by Douglas Stuart

Where to Start with Douglas Stuart

If you want the Booker winner
→ Shuggie Bain (2020) — the novel about a boy and his alcoholic mother in 1980s Glasgow.

If you want a love story
→ Young Mungo (2022) — a Protestant boy and a Catholic boy in 1990s Glasgow.

If you want his newest novel
→ John of John (2026) — a father and son on the Isle of Harris.

3 Douglas Stuart Books, in Order

In What Order to Read Douglas Stuart

The three novels are not a series: no characters carry over, and each stands alone. Publication order is still the natural way in. Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo share a city and a decade, and read together as a pair about Glasgow after the closure of its heavy industry. John of John leaves the city for the Outer Hebrides and moves the focus from mothers to a father.

All three deal with alcoholism, violence or sexual abuse, often in detail. Young Mungo is the hardest going of the three.

A reading path
1. Shuggie Bain (2020)
2. Young Mungo (2022)
3. John of John (2026)

Watch

Douglas Stuart on Shuggie Bain

Louisiana Channel · Interview20212021

▸ 01▸ Shuggie Bain

Recorded at the Louisiana Literature festival in Denmark in August 2021, Stuart talks to Synne Rifbjerg about how his own childhood and his mother shaped Shuggie Bain.

How Douglas Stuart Writes: Glasgow from the Inside

Stuart writes from close to his own life without writing memoir. Like Shuggie, he grew up in Sighthill with a mother who drank, and he has said in interviews that her effort to keep up appearances shaped Agnes, who dresses up and holds her head high while the household falls apart. He wrote that book over about a decade and has said that part of the reason it took so long was that he did not want to let the characters go.

His Glasgow is specific: tenements and council estates, pit villages left behind after the mines closed, Protestant and Catholic gangs, and long stretches of dialogue in Glaswegian Scots. Critics have compared him to Dickens for the scale of the poverty and the large casts of drinkers, neighbours and hangers-on, and he gives the most damaged characters, Agnes above all, the same tenderness as the children.

The violence in his books is direct and the endings are not consoling, which some reviewers found too much in Young Mungo. What holds the three novels together is a single situation: a boy who is different, and the adults who either cannot protect him or will not. In John of John he turns it round and gives the father the same secret as the son.