At fifteen, Mungo, a teenager with a sensitivity unlike the other boys in the neighborhood, lives in a working-class district of post-Thatcher-era Glasgow, in a Protestant family: fatherless, with an alcoholic mother and a brother who represents everything he hates. In a masculinized environment, surrounded by unemployment and street fights, he has only the support and care of his sister, Jodie. After a family altercation, his mother decides to send Mungo fishing with two strangers from Alcoholics Anonymous so they can turn him into a respectable man. On the way to a loch in western Scotland with these strangers whose drunken jokes hide a murky past, Mungo can think only of returning to his friend James, the only place where he has discovered he can be himself.

Douglas Stuart brings us, with lyrical and vivid prose, closer to the dangerous first love between two teenagers in this lucid and moving story about the meaning of masculinity and duty to family, the violence faced by queer identities, and the risks of loving someone too much.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism and giving full voice to people rarely acknowledged in the literary world, Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story about the bounds of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the dangers of loving someone too much.

Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars --Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic-- and they should be sworn enemies if they're to be seen as men at all. Yet against all odds, they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they fall in love, they dream of finding somewhere they belong, while Mungo works hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his big brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. And when several months later Mungo's mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts, he will need to summon all his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.