Young Mungo

Young Mungo is a novel by the Scottish-American writer Douglas Stuart, published in 2022 by Grove Press in the United States and Picador in Britain. It is his second novel, after Shuggie Bain.

The book follows Mungo Hamilton, a teenager in a working-class estate in Glasgow at the start of the 1990s, growing up with an alcoholic mother who comes and goes and a brother whose reputation he is measured against. The estate is divided by sectarian loyalties carried over from Ireland, and the young men on it define themselves by which school they went to and which team they support. Mungo meets James, a Catholic boy who keeps pigeons, and the two of them find a way of being together in the doocot before anyone notices. Stuart sets that against the violence that surrounds them, including the fishing trip his mother arranges for him with two men she does not know well, which is the other half of the novel.

Stuart grew up in Glasgow and writes about the poverty and the masculinity of that world, and the two halves of the book are told against each other rather than in sequence.