Shuggie Bain felt like a lightning-in-a-bottle read, but Douglas Stuart has done it again. I had such high expectations going into this books, and Stuart has smashed them! There are similarities in settings and themes to Shuggie, but it never feels like a retread and I adored all of it. The themes of alcoholism, homophobia and poverty are obviously a tough read at times, but Stuart laces the pathos with a perfect blend of hope, wit and characters that leap off the page.

Having read Shuggie Bain not so long ago, it’s impossible for me to not compare these two novels. Lots of themes run parallel in both, but not quite together. Shuggie and Mungo both have alcoholic mothers, they both know what it’s like to grow up wanting (affection & basic life essentials), they both have complicated and unhealthy relationships with said mothers, they both have two older siblings who play various roles in their lives, they’re both ... “artistic” as someone at the end of the book puts it when he tries to describe Mungo’s sexuality.

So, there are many similarities, but the two books are certainly not interchangeable. Whereas Shuggie Bain felt more about the mother, this one focuses profoundly on Mungo. Sometimes you wish it wouldn’t. Sometimes it’s too heartbreaking to read another page, too upsetting, too revolting, too tender, too much. The emotions are high, and I found myself on edge, my heart pumping whilst I just hoped the sense of impending dread I felt on Mungo’s behalf would prove to be unfounded.

The thing that stuck with me the most: the juxtaposition of incredible violence, abuse, rage, bigotry, and hatred with equally incredible tenderness, love, warmth, compassion, and beauty. I found this Switch to be both disarming and disorienting, probably because of the skipping back and forth in time— though, not necessarily in an unpleasant way. The things Stuart can make you feel with a handful of words are just unreal. How can I be smiling about first loves and the warm & fuzzies that can bring, and then crying at the shitty, traumatic stuff that can happen to people the next?

I wouldn‘t recommend this if you’re looking for a light read. I didn’t come away from either book feeling lighthearted or warm and fuzzy. This is GRIT. Grit your fucking teeth, because you’re in for something you won’t soon forget. It was a lot at times, and I felt for many of the characters who were just as trapped as Mungo. Trapped by so many things that were (and many that were not) out of their control. The cycle of poverty, substance abuse, and violence is obvious but sometimes inescapable.

Thank you to Netgalley and to the publisher for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Young Mungo tells the story not only of first love, but of family, friendship, loyalty, and acceptance, in a duel timeline that takes us backwards to unsettled but happy times of the burgeoning of a romance, and to the present more horrific twists as Mungo finds himself at the mercy of unexpected evils.

Douglas Stuart is exceptional at drawing out from his vividly drawn characters so much sympathy and understanding that the reader cannot help but be deeply affected by the many turns taken in the lives of those portrayed.

Young Mungo is a love song to working class boys, and allows them to reclaim their own stories, to tell them the way they want to tell them, and to create their own endings.

A deeply moving and gripping story.

DOUGLAS STUART – YOUNG MUNGO ******

I read this novel in advance of publication through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

OMG. What a read. Six stars out of five. The Booker prize-winning author of Shuggie Bains, a book featured on Corrie no less, Douglas Stuart had a lot to live up to. And he has.

On the surface, set in the tenements of Glasgow, surrounded by alcohol and violence, Mungo’s life is similar to Shruggie’s. But their stories are very different. Protestant and Catholic gangs from either side of the motorway regularly fight each other with homemade weapons, sometimes to the death. Coming to terms with your sexuality in such an environment is difficult if not impossible. Inevitably Mungo falls for (in Glaswegian terms) a gentle boy pigeon fancier, James, from the opposite side of the tracks. A boy Mungo’s violent brother Ha-Ha wants to douse in petrol and set alight, such is his hatred of gays.

In a parallel story two alcoholics Mungo’s mother has met at her AA group, Gallowgate and St Christopher, take Mungo on a camping trip by a deserted loch to ‘make him a man’. What she didn’t know was that both men are paedophiles, just released from prison.

Nothing is sensationalised. If anything, the style is matter of fact. Absent, alcoholic parents are two a penny where Mungo lives; out of work men sit around blaming the government for their downfall; violence among young men is a way of life. Mungo doesn’t want to be part of it, but as a schoolboy brought up by his teenage sister, he has little choice. To anyone who has not had to live like that, the boy’s physical and mental resilience is astounding.

Stuart’s writing, his use of metaphor and simile, is outstanding – a constant delight. I had to stop myself at the end of each chapter from hurriedly reading into the next in order to make it last. His masterly use of words is something to be savoured, like a great painting. His mind is unique and extraordinary. This is only book two: I can’t wait for his next

The second novel by Douglas Stuart is also about a boy’s love for his mammy. Mungo and his two siblings are beautifully depicted as is the Glasgow that they live in which is totally true to life as is the homophobia and random violence which permeates the book.

Not an easy read but a totally rewarding one.

Highly recommended but you may need an Anglo-Glaswegian dictionary close at hand!

Here is the bird that never flew
Here is the tree that never grew
Here is the bell that never rang
Here is the fish that never swam

This is the verse used to remember the four miracles performed in Glasgow by St Mungo, the patron saint of that city and the saint after whom Mungo Hamilton, our protagonist in Young Mungo, was named by his mother. The verse is quoted during the course of the book and, if you look at it again as you finish the book, you will find yourself reflecting on some of the key moments in the story because birds, a fire, a bell and fish play key roles.

Young Mungo is the story of two episodes in the life of Mungo Hamilton which are interleaved through the book. There is no specific time mentioned in the book, but events such as a Celtic vs. Rangers derby with an historic outcome place it firmly in 1992/3 which becomes interesting when you start to make the inevitable comparisons with Stuart’s debut, and Booker-winning, novel, Shuggie Bain. That first novel opens in 1992 with Shuggie 15 years old and in this new novel Mungo is also 15 about to turn 16 and so almost exactly the same age as Shuggie and living through the same time period. Add to that that he is the youngest of three children with an alcoholic mother to whom he is devoted and an absent father. And then both books are set in Glasgow, although this new one does leave the city for a while, a point to which I’ll return shortly. (As an aside, I find it strange to be writing about someone called Douglas Stuart because my father’s first two names are Stuart Douglas!).

Where this novel differs significantly from Shuggie Bain is in its tone: this one is much, much darker and far more uncomfortable to read. And part of this is due to Stuart’s talents as a writer. There is quite a lot of violence in this book, both physical and sexual. There is a lot of poverty. There are several very unpleasant people (and one or two good, if flawed, ones). Stuart’s writing is very evocative. When he writes a description of a sordid event, you feel like you need to go and wash your hands that have been holding the book. But, and here were return to the time spent out of the city, when he writes about nature he makes the world around you come alive.

I found this a difficult book to read. There were multiple episodes where my instinct was to skip over them because I feared what was coming. And, in most cases, the plot does not make unexpected twists and turns: if you think something bad is going to happen, it probably is. It’s a book that I admired rather than enjoyed: at times I was put in mind of A Little Life by Hanya Yanigahara although it is a very different set up to that book.

In the end, I’m giving this 4 stars. It was not a pleasurable reading experience, but it is an excellently written book. My hope is that Stuart’s next book will be something different where he can show his undoubted writing talents in a different light.

I would have given this book 4 stars had it not been for the needlessly confusing timeline and the excessive length. I almost gave up about a third of the way through - at that point the book seemed like a compilation of back-story scenes deleted from Shuggie Bain. But glad I stuck with it, a moving and gripping love/crime story powers the later stages of the novel. It could have been so much better though with a harder and more reader-friendly edit. Less would certainly have been more!

"Ever fallen in love with someone
Ever fallen in love, in love with someone
Ever fallen in love, in love with someone
You shouldn't have fallen in love with"
The Buzzcocks

"So much for the golden future, I can't even start
I've had every promise broken, there's anger in my heart
You don't know what it's like, you don't have a clue
If you did you'd find yourselves doing the same thing too"
Judas Priest

Coming towards the last quarter of Young Mungo I took a break to listen to Spotify and, on shuffle play from my playlist, it chose Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn't've) and Breaking the Law, which seemed very appropriate.

It might have been even more appropriate to have had the two songs on autorepeat as it's hard to get away from the fact that Young Mungo feels largely like a rewrite of Shuggie Bain. Now it is perhaps unfair to expect authors to always break new ground, but when their debut novel was a powerful but flawed Booker Prize winner, my expectations for their 2nd novel are rather higher.

In many respects I found this a stronger novel than Shuggie Bain - it wore its slightly excessive length more easily whereas Shuggie lost my interest in the middle - but I can't help but feel a little disappointed.

Young Mungo consists of two intertwined sections, one see a few months after the other begins (and immediately after it ends).

The longer of the two gives us Mungo's back story and family history up to the age of almost 16: his alcoholic and largely absent mother (less hagiographically portrayed than Shuggie's); his older sister, who fills his mother's gap but ambitious to leave the Glasgow projects for university ("She would round out her vowels and suppress her glottal stop. She would like her bread to be brown and her films to be foreign. Perhaps she would meet someone at uni who she could quietly love, but she would never bring them home at Christmas".); and his older brother, leader of a gang of drug-dealing violence-dispensing Protestant thugs. And in the Romeo-and-Juliet plot, we see the lonely Mungo form a relationship with a Catholic boy a few months his senior, James, a pigeon-fancying neighbour, their friendship blossoming into a love that violates two taboos, same-sex and cross-faith. This section is also particularly strong on how little of life Mungo experiences outside his immediate confines ("So many lives were happening only two miles away from his and they all seemed brighter than his own.")

Mungo's character is neatly summed up in one paragraph:

"Everything about this boy was about his mother. He lived for her in a way that she had never lived for him. It was as though Mo-Maw was a puppeteer, and she had the tangled, knotted strings of him in her hands. She animated every gesture he made: the timid smile, the thrumming nerves, the anxious biting, the worry, the pleasing, the way he made himself smaller in any room he was in, the watchful way he stood on the edge before committing, and the kindness, the big, big love."

In the 2nd strand, Mungo is sent on a fishing trip with two men. Rather inexplicably, his mother has pimped him out to two retrobates she met at Alcholics Anonymous - the local group takes the dedication to alcohol and anonymity seriously, the sobriety and 12 Steps rather less so - asking them to 'man him up', with predictably disastrous (and somewhat over-the-top) consequences, indeed Mungo's actions didn't really ring true to me and it felt Stuart jumps-the-shark here in his eagerness to pile on the drama and misery.

Overall - 3.5 stars, without the high expectations this likely merits 4, but rounded down to 3.

Young Mungo follows fifteen year old Mungo, who’s neglected by his absent, alcoholic mother, and is raised by his older sister, Jodie, who tries her best with taking care of him, even though she is a teenager herself. Mungo has an older brother, Hamish or Ha-Ha, who is head of a Protestant gang (or young team) where what they class as fun and banter, is sectarianism, fighting & being ‘big men.’ Mungo goes through many obstacles during the book, from dealing with the ways of which his family want him to be, toughening him up, making a man out of him, to meeting another boy, James, who happens to be Catholic, who also happens to be the boy Mungo falls head first for.

The book plays out in two different timelines and the novel jumps seamlessly back and forth between them, which I think worked really well and kept me bouncing on my seat due to the anxiety I started to feel as I read on. This book deals with a lot of hard themes such as religion (Protestants against Catholics,) abuse, homophobia, poverty, addiction, slurs, and I feel as though not a lot of people will be expecting such a heavy, bleak and depressing read.

I went into this book expecting a somewhat sad, coming of age queer story, but finished with such a profound and tiring bleakness over all the ‘ifs’ this book had. I felt like I was watching certain parts of my own life play out, and couldn’t help but shift on my seat, take pauses while reading, and had to big myself up to continue reading because I knew what was going to happen, I knew how Mungo was feeling and I knew the effect it would have on him.

Mungo & James were the stars of the book to me, they’re relationship together was done exceptionally well, and really captured the playful and hopeful feeling of first love, along with the heartache and problems that come with being young, queer, in a world that frown upon it. The things they had to experience in this book broke my heart, and although I knew it was coming right from the beginning, I still felt nervous getting to the last quarter of the book because I knew it would be painful and horrifying. Minus their relationship together, both boys go through so much, together and separately, and although we don’t get a glimpse into the future, I surely hoped that both boys found the happiness they both so desperately deserved.

The way scheme life was portrayed, the focus on the bigotry, the violence, the tight-knit characters were done realistically, and even though many bad events happened during the book, it made my heart swell at the fact that I could relate so heavily to a lifestyle in a book, where it wasn’t just because of my queerness. There were so many things in this book that not a lot of readers will be able to identify with, unless you grew up in Scotland & I think that made reading this that little bit more special.

Douglas Stuart really pushed the bar on this novel, and I can’t wait to see what other works he has in store for us.

It’s a pity that Douglas Stuart has already won the Booker because this would be a worthy contender. It’s dedicated to ‘Alexander, and all the gentle sons of Glasgow’ and, like Shuggie Bain, it is again about one of those gentle sons, kind and sensitive Mungo, fifteen years old and youngest son of the unpredictable Mo-Maw (whose name comes from her Mon – Thursday visits to AA). An artistic, anxious boy, many people find him endearing but others take advantage of his naivety.
Twin narratives follow a fishing trip in the Highlands with two disreputable ‘friends’ of his mother from Alcoholics Anonymous, and the lead up to the events which have prompted his mother to send him away to learn to become a man.
Anyone who has read Shuggie Bain will not expect this to be an easy read. Stuart’s Glasgow is one of grinding poverty, drink and glue, unemployment and sectarian warfare. Tormented by his sadistic hard-man big brother, Hamish, Mungo is never safe from violence but, as both strands of the story reach their denouement, the brutality crescendos and there are some utterly chilling moments when you get a forewarning of what is about to happen.
However this does serve to make the tender moments in the book more magical. Most obviously, the love story between Mungo and James (not a spoiler when you consider the front cover) but also the relationship with his sister, Jodie and more surprisingly with his mother, who he worships even as she proves herself spectacularly unworthy of his love, as well as neighbours and minor characters.
Stuart is particularly good at giving the reader a glimpse of humanity in even the worst villains. Jodie points out that their brother Hamish is a result of ‘the rage that built when you never let the hurt out’. The real villains, Stuart suggests, are the impoverished environment and a bleak future which turn people from happy children co-operating to build dens from rubbish, into tiny thugs by ten or eleven capable of shocking sectarian violence. The age of 15 is a particular flashpoint. Whilst it is the age when Mungo is forced, brutally to grow up, it is also the age when many of the girls in the book (including Mungo’s own mother and his brother’s girlfriend) become mothers.
There is a lot to unpack here about growing up too early, about children raising children, about adults failing children. There is also a big point to be made about love, real love. The irony is that the relationships shown between boys and girls are mainly commodified or an expression of status. The most genuine relationship in the book, Mungo and James’, is taboo, not only because they are both boys, but also because one is Protestant and the other Catholic.
Reading this often felt like a punch in the guts but there is no question that Stuart’s writing is absolutely beautiful, perspicacious and humane. An incredible achievement.

Another masterpiece from Douglas Stuart! Much like the brilliant Shuggie Bain, this is a bleak read in parts with intense content that some readers will find triggering, but like its predecessor, it's not without hope. Young Mungo tells the story of teenage Mungo Hamilton, a teenager Protestant boy from Glasgow who falls in love with a Catholic lad in the same housing scheme. Mungo navigates this divide and struggles within his family, while also in fear of his older brother Hamish, who is a notorious gang leader regularly beating Catholic gangs to a pulp.

There are a number of similarities with this and Shuggie Bain, particularly in regards to the family unit, but this is a hugely engrossing and affecting novel in its own right. The characterisation is just as strong but the love story gives it a different tenderness to Shuggie, one you spend the whole novel hoping will survive, despite the odds.

Thank you to NetGalley and Picador for this ARC in exchange for a fair review.

3.5 stars


So much to like about this book.
It's at times touching,and at others raw.
It has some memorable characters ,and relationships that just made me smile (Jodie and Mungo mostly).

It has shades of Shuggie in it,but once or twice in tender moments I was reminded of Jonathan Harvey's Beautiful Thing. This is a compliment.

Once again set in a harsh reality of alcoholic parent,neglect and depressing circumstances.


I enjoyed it,but I think my expectations were too high having had Shuggie Bain break my heart... this one left me a lot colder.
I know I shouldn't compare,but who can help it?

I usually try to post reviews that are spoiler free, but I feel the need to make an exception in this case, purely because a character is raped twice. Whilst the actual rapes aren't discussed in overly graphic detail, there is extensive discussions about them as well as the characters thoughts in the aftermath of the attacks, something I personally found extremely upsetting, particularly as the character is unable to immediately take themselves out of the dangerous environment. I mention this solely as I feel this could be triggering to survivors of abuse.

Onto the actual novel itself, Young Mungo is set in a very similar environment to Shuggie Bain - tough, impoverished Glasgow, a young gay boy with an alcoholic, abusive mother who is struggling alongside his siblings to make ends meet. The prose flows smoothly, with the Glaswegian slang really bringing the characters to life. Mungo and James' relationship is the highlight of the novel with both characters and their love story being beautifully written. Stuart is clearly a talented author, with an ability to write dark, heartbreaking stories with an element of hope and redemption, however I'd like to see him broach a different setting/topic for his next novel.

As much as I struggled with the content of the book at times - to the point where I debated whether or not to finish it - Young Mungo clearly shows Stuart's writing talents. Being capable to write characters that the reader can empathise with and feel such heartbreak for is no small task - especially with some of the more seedier characters in the novel.

Thanks to NetGalley, Pan Macmillan and Picador for the ARC.

NO SPOILERS:

An author’s work will always be compared to their previous work and more so when this is only the second book, but the first chapter or so of Young Mungo had me thinking this was going to be Shuggie Bain, version 2. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. Not that I didn’t love Shuggie, but I didn’t want to read a rehash. Yes, there is a young gay boy (fifteen year old Mungo) and an alcoholic mother (Mo-Maw) and siblings getting by, and the setting is again a tough, brutal Glasgow, so whilst it is a similar setting and plot, it’s a different story.

Stuart Douglas is nigh on a genius at dialogue and dialect; once you hit the rhythm of the accent, it flows easily. He slips back stories in without a step being missed and though written in the third person, he still reveals a character’s thoughts and personal feelings. “Where would you go?” “…somewhere people aren’t always leaving”. See? The man can write!

I wrote this of Shuggie:

“There were moments I wanted to abandon the book as I felt mostly anger at the majority of people in Shuggie’s life. Their aggression, intolerance, bigotry, ignorance made it impossible for me to sympathise with them and I did not want them in my head. But I did care about Shuggie; he deserved so much better.”

And I’m writing this about Mungo:

There were moments I wanted to abandon the book as I felt mostly anger at the majority of people in Mungo’s life. Their aggression, intolerance, bigotry, ignorance made it impossible for me to sympathise with them and I did not want them in my head. I didn’t care quite so much about Mungo.

Douglas is undoubtedly a very skilled writer and it is because he writes so well that I will read more but I would like him to write about something different. I loved Shuggie Bain, I really, really like Young Mungo (Mungo Bain?) but I’m not sure I’d read another book about a dis-functional, alcohol driven family, no matter how well written.

There are a lot of buts written above so I think, for me this book is ah, yes, brilliant but…

Thank you to NetGalley and Macmillan/Picador for the Advanced Reader Copy of the book, which I have voluntarily reviewed.

Another triumph from Douglas Stuart. Absolutely compelling. Stuart's ability to bring character's to life is unsurpassed.

The author of the magnificent “Shuggie Bain” does it again.

I read “Shuggie Bain” in early mid July 2020 and immediately called it as the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize (around a week before even the longlist was announced) – a prediction which was fulfilled. The summary of my review (a tweet of which the BBC featured on their live page minutes after the winner announcement) was that it was a “desperately moving, heartbreaking book: one which places hope and despair, love and brokenness on the same page, treating them with equal weight and empathy.”

This is the author’s second book, one largely written, if not fully completed, at the time of “Shuggie Bain”’s success (although at the time it was under the working title “Loch Awe”) – and if anything my quote is even truer of this novel which is both at times lighter but also in places much darker than its predecessor.

At that time this book was described by some interviewers as a same-sex take on Romeo and Juliet – a tale of love across a sectarian and territorial gang divide (which I have to say sounded like a “West Side Story” and made my worried about its originality) but was I think better described by the author as being about “the pressure we put on working-class boys to ‘man-up’ and all the terrible things and violence that can flow from that.” – or to use my phrase I would say it is about the insidious toxicity of masculinity, particularly when amplified by societal deprivation.

The main protagonist is the fifteen year old Mungo Hamilton, son of a largely absent alcoholic single-mother (herself still under 35) and largely bought up by his older sister Jodie (now 17) in a Glasgow housing scheme. While Jodie is both well liked and studious, the two year older Hamish (Ha-Ha), despite his short stature and “speccy” appearance is a widely feared gang leader, head of a Protestant group of Billy Boys who engage both in crime and in brutal fights against the neighbouring Catholic gang from the next settlement – the Royston Bhoys.

Mungo remains fiercely and tenderly loyal to his mother – Mo-Maw (short for Monday-Thursday Maureen: her Alcoholics Anonymous identification): his two siblings, particularly the scathing Jodie, having long given up on her – and this is a drain on his life as well as check on his future.

But in a fiercely violent masculine and heterosexual working class world, one ironically made only the fiercer and more violent by the otherwise emasculating impact of the Thatcher-era cuts on the heavy industry that built the culture: Mungo’s even bigger struggle is to somehow conform to the conventions and expectations of others (not the least Ha-Ha), when he himself is sensitive, artistic, nervous (with a facial tic which may be Tourette’s and a number of other compulsive behaviours) and increasingly aware of his attraction to his own sex. At one late stage Mungo lists the disappointment of others and what they have called him “Idiot. Weakling. Liar. Poofter. Coward. Pimp. Bigot” – all the more heartbreaking as coming in many cases from those closest to him.

Then he meets James Jamieson – a slightly older Catholic boy whose flat backs on to his but who he first meets on a waste ground where Jamie has a doocot (a pigeon shed). Jamie recently lost his mother and now effectively lives alone for much of his time as his father is an offshore rig worker and spends his spare time doe-fleein (the lure-ing of other doe-fleers pigeons away through sexual attraction forming an understated metaphor for the whole novel).

Jamie too is attracted to boys – something his father found out (due to Jamie’s naïve use of an early chatline) and is now under firm instructions to find a girl and is planning to stall his father for as long as it takes to hit sixteen and escape with money he has stashed in some videocassettes which look like bound books (note that these are a lovely biographical touch – Douglas Stuart has revealed in interviews that the “closest things to books were shelves of vinyl mock-ups of classic books that were actually video cases”).

Mungo and Jamie fall for each other, despite what they know will be the reaction of their families (particularly Mungo’s brother and Jamie’s Dad) – reactions coloured by both sectarianism and anti-homosexuality.

The book plays out in two halves. The first set over a number of months is Mungo’s life in the period up to, during and after his relationship with James. The second a few months later is the aftermath, the book opening with Mo-Maw sending him on a rather hastily arranged fishing and camping trip to a remote Scottish loch with two men she knows from AA (Gallowgate and St (Sunday-Thursday) Christopher) – the two having proposed it as a way to man-up Mungo – the trip itself forming the second narrative strand.

What I thought was interesting was to discuss where the book is both similar to and different from “Shuggie Bain”.

The largest similarity is in the basic family unit. An alcoholic mother; an absent father (even if the absence here is more permanent); three children (two boys and a girl); the titular character the younger son (and one devoted to his mother depsite all the evidence of the futility of helping her); the middle child (Leckie and Jodie) being the studious member of the family (as well as being very sensitively portrayed by Douglas Stuart – who clearly has a liking for the put-upon middle sibling).

The mother’s although ostensibly the same are I think very differently portrayed. Many people have argued that the first book could easily have been called Anges Bain (with Agnes a key protagonist and sympathetically portrayed with her back story and struggles with addiction); I don’t think anyone will argue that this book could have been called Mo-Maw with it very centred around Mungo.

In terms of geographical setting – both are in of course set in the author’s birth town of Glasgow (albeit Shuggie Bain more on the outskirts for much of its time and this having a second strand some way North).

The temporal setting is for me fascinating and important. “Shuggie Bain” was set over the period 1981-1992 with Shuggie from 5-15. No year is specified her but an Auld-Firm reference sets the book firmly in 1992-93 with Mungo approaching 16: so that in both calendar years and ages this book is a sequel to “Shuggie Bain”.

And this ties in to another element – the first book was deliberately almost circular in plot and effectively repetitive in its form: tracing the story of Anges’s many brief recoveries from and longer relapses into alcohol addiction. This by contrast is a much more linear story – tracing not so much the process of accumulation (of alcohol on the family unit, of Thatcher-era heavy-industry decimation on the society) but the sudden impact of that accumulated toxicity (with the toxicity her masculinity as well as alcohol) in a series of dramatic incidents including a vicious gang fight and a series of shocking occurences.

Religion plays a role in both with interestingly mothers that seem far less concerned at cross the religious divide than those around them.

Both books have a Saints name and legend at their heart. The legend of St Agnes (and “I am on fire. I do not burn”) forms the basis of an impromptu sermon in “Shuggie Bain” when Agnes first attends AA about how alcoholism consumes everything – something which of course is at the tragic heart of that novel. Here Mungo is explicitly named by his (Protestant) mother after Glasgow’s Patron Saint – and the Saint’s four miracles (featured on the Glasgow crest) “the bird that never flew, the tree that never grew, the bell that never rang, the fish that never swam” are also subtly and brilliantly reversed at key and tragic points in the novel (with pigeons that will never fly again, an attempted conflagration, a man named Bell as well as a phone call with consequences, an aborted fishing trip and series of near drownings).

In terms of cover art this book mirrors the first in both its US and UK covers. The US cover a beautiful piece of family/self portrait which captures a key element of the book but which perhaps captures a little too much of the tenderness of the book and not enough of the rawness of its setting: for Shuggie Bain Peter Marlow’s picture of (I think) his wife Fiona and oldest son Max embracing on a comfortable pillow and duvet; here Kyle Thompson beautiful self-portrait of a boy part underwater. The UK covers an iconic piece of photography which to me at least speak more powerfully: Jez Coulser’s striking “Easterhouse” boy on a cross for “Shuggie Bain” and here Wolfgang Tillman’s “The Cock (Kiss)”

But the largest similarity of all is that this is another superbly and clearly patiently crafted piece of writing, with deeply rounded characters, a vivid use of language and many striking and original similes. And as a result one which is both engrossing ( I found myself thorough immersed in Mungo’s story just like Shuggie’s, and actually missed the book each time I was away from it) and hugely affecting (with its mix of light and dark).

This is a great depiction of working class Glaswegian life. It follows two boys as the meet and experience first love. It was tough to read in places but overall my last info impression was of sweetness.