Douglas Stuart’s two previous novels – the Booker Prize-winning “Shuggie Bain” (2020) and “Young Mungo” (2022) – were both set in Glasgow tenements, said Michael Arditti in The Spectator. For his third, Stuart has “moved north”, to the island of Harris in the Outer Hebrides.
Cal, 22, “returns to his family croft” on the island, after spending four years studying textiles in Edinburgh, in response to a call from his father, John, telling him that his grandmother is dying. Cal is gay, and comfortable with that fact; his father, a deacon of the island’s Free Presbyterian Church, which adheres to an “extreme biblical morality”, is in denial about his own homosexual leanings. The relationship between the two – by turns loving and violent – is at the heart of this “beautifully observed” novel.
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