Douglas Stuart, the Booker Prize-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo is returning with a new novel exploring sexuality in a rural Scottish Hebrides setting. ‘John of John’ is the latest novel from Stuart, an author who brings his experiences as a gay man born and raised in Scotland to his works.
Now thought of as one of the greatest British writers working today, Stuart’s début novel, Shuggie Bain was initially turned down by many publishers, both in Britain and America. However, its exploration of alcoholism, health and family relationships – based on Stuart’s own experiences – quickly made it a hit when it was published, earning countless accolades including the 2020 Booker Prize, the Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year (2020), and British Book Awards: Overall Book of the Year and Début Book of the Year (2021).
Acclaim for Stuart’s previous two novels mean that John of John, due to be published in May 2026, is likely to be a hotly anticipated publication.
The new novel centres John-Calum Macleod who finds himself low on funds and with little to show for his art school education. The author himself has an arts background that he may be bringing to the writing, having studied at the Scottish College of Textiles and London’s Royal College of Art, before moving to New York City at the age of 24, where he built a successful career in fashion design, while also beginning to write alongside it.
The synopsis of the novel explains that, out of money, “John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home to the island of Harris to find that not much has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal resumes his old life, caught 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.
“While 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 the seasons pass, everything is poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly entangled.
“John of John is the heart-breaking story of a young man’s return home and how the bonds of family life are torn by the weight of expectation.”
