John of John

From Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo comes a stunning new novel, John of John.

SUSAN REVIEW

Douglas Stuart’s two previous novels, Shuggie Bain (winner of the 2020 Booker Prize) and Young Mungo (2022), vividly capture the confronting realities of poverty, violence, addiction and religious conflict in 1980s/90s Glasgow. They are also fundamentally concerned with the tensions and bonds between parents and children, and the struggle of queer young men to find love and acceptance. I was fortunate enough to have an advance copy of Douglas’s highly anticipated new novel John of John; and while it reprises some of the major subjects of those earlier novels and again includes elements of brutal realism, it is more tender in mood and less urgent in pace. It also shifts to a rural setting — the windswept, isolated Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides — in which a clash of values between father and son forms the basis of the plot. 

The novel begins with the perspective of John-Calum (Cal), who having completed a degree at art school in Glasgow, is now out of work and adrift. He takes the ferry home to the Isle of Harris to help his divorced father, also called John, care for Ella, Cal’s grandmother on his mother’s side. The opening is a brilliant example of establishing, with subtlety and a sense of intrigue, some of the novel’s main concerns: the father’s religious piety and the son’s secret homosexuality; a narrow-minded, openly judgmental rural community contrasted with Cal’s hidden, hedonistic desires; the secrecy and guilt in the lives of various characters that are gradually revealed in the course of a carefully crafted narrative. As Cal sets off on his return to the island where he grew up, the novel also raises the crucial question: where, if at all, is home? While Cal resumes his old life with his father — a sheep farmer, weaver, and pillar of the local Presbyterian church — he feels achingly out of place and time. While he is John the son of John, he is essentially Cal searching for an independent and authentic identity.

John of John is also a sensorially rich evocation of the landscape and its symbolic significance for the characters. Its bleakness represents the rigidity and stifling nature of the community, while its barrenness reflects Cal’s feelings of profound loneliness. The physical setting, in short, is more than a mere backdrop to the action; like the novels of writers such as Thomas Hardy, Emily Bronte and Cormac McCarthy, physical setting becomes almost a character in itself.

I can’t recommend John of John highly enough for its psychologically complex and often heartbreaking portrayal of a son and his father; its insights into the challenge to understand oneself and others; its skillful interweaving of events; and the beauty of the writing. 

The novel won’t be released in Australia until May 2026, but you are welcome to reserve a copy now. 

PUBLISHER REVIEW

Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his Glaswegian grandmother Ella, who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for decades.

Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything is poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly entangled.

John of John is a vivid, moving, and beautifully crafted novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a close-knit community and a fraying family, of a father’s expectations and a son’s desires.