John of John

‘A 22-year-old arts student reluctantly returns from Edinburgh to his home on the Isle of Harris in Douglas Stuart’s third novel. We loved the rich, textural detail of the story, which is set in the 80s and examines young Cal’s fraught relationship with his domineering father. There’s a vivid sense of time and place, as the island becomes the site of bristling tensions between secret lovers, feuding families, and a stand-off between tradition and modernity. This excavation of family, violence, and shame is woven through with beautiful imagistic detail, and – unexpectedly but wonderfully – shades of hope.’

Suzi Feay, Times Literary Supplement

‘There is a slower pace in John of John than in Stuart’s previous books, and a tamped-down quality; the outbursts of violence are fewer but just as shocking. Though Ella, in her cunning, eccentricity and humour, is a vivid creation, she is no match for Shuggie’s vivacious, hellacious mother, Agnes. While Cal’s talent echoes the artistic bent of Shuggie’s brother Leek, and that of young Mungo (and their creator, who pursued a career in fashion design), he is more wary and reticent than either of his predecessors. The characters’ language is less inventively foul, but their “loch-deep rage” is just as potent…

‘Stuart steadily tightens the knot on his islanders, trapped in their love and hatred along the “ribbon road” that threads the crofts “like a string through too few pearls”. Comings and goings are visible to all, but the characters still manage to keep a surprising amount of secrets, and Stuart tenderly teases these out in all the shades of shame, despair and guilt, like the myriad colours in a fine tweed.’

Mark Harris, New York Times

‘Stuart is not just a very good writer but an immensely skilled storyteller who is more than up to the extraordinarily challenging task he sets himself – to build bridges between characters who are so cut off from one another and from themselves that they are, as Cal’s grandmother puts it, “islands within islands.” 

‘Notwithstanding the novel’s striking setting, he’s not given to rhapsodic fugues about the sky and the sea and the crags; he’s more interested in the seams and faults and chasms within people who have come to believe that they’re living past any expectations of pleasure.’

Sam Worley, Vulture 

‘Stuart has spoken of the ways queer literature is “so middle class it very rarely intersects with the working class,” and it’s refreshing to read stories in which the psychodrama of the coming-out process is just one of many challenges his characters face as they find their footing in the world. But it has also meant Stuart’s novels have had less to say about gayness as such. What they have said has felt a bit tentative and superficial — as in Shuggie Bain — or, worse, morally schematic. Young Mungo groaned under the weight of its intent to make a big statement about the harms of patriarchy (and about the antidote, which turns out to be — shocker — love). John of John changes tack dramatically toward a sprawling, emotionally rich saga that extends Stuart’s investigation into masculinity while sketching a world in which his gay characters come fully, finally alive. It’s his best yet.‘