Douglas Stuart has a rare gift. The Scottish writer, whose debut novel Shuggie Bain deservedly won the 2020 Booker Prize, creates vivid characters, settings and images without letting his literary skill get in the way of plot. His second novel, Young Mungo, has a similar feel and is in many ways a kind of sequel. The characters are different, as is the Glaswegian housing scheme and the year – we are now in 1993 rather than the 1980s – but the milieu is familiar.
The protagonist, Mungo Hamilton, is a frail, fatherless 15-year-old, but appears much younger. His complexion, vocal tic and poor-fitting clothes lead people to think he’s ‘thirteen, tops’. Early on he’s described as a ‘waif’ – a Dickensian word that alerts the reader to the tenor of the novel.
The story begins with Mungo’s often-absent mother coercing him to go for a weekend of fishing and camping with two lager-swilling men she knows from Alcoholics Anonymous.
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