An Evening with Douglas Stuart

***UPDATE: Please note that the in-person event is now SOLD OUT. However, you can still register to attend online and receive a signed & dedicated copy of Young Mungo***

We are incredibly excited to welcome Douglas Stuart to the bookshop for an evening event to discuss his eagerly anticipated second novel, Young Mungo, as well as his 2020 Booker Prize-winning debut, the beloved Shuggie Bain. Ever since hosting a book group with Douglas back in September 2020, we've been big fans of him and his work. We're so pleased to be reunited with him on Monday 18th April for this special event. He will be in conversation with fellow writer, Kirstin Innes.

About Young Mungo:

“She said she named ye after a saint. That after she did, ye never once made her regret that. She said that you were the softest, sweetest boy she had ever known.”

Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in the hyper-masculine and violently sectarian world of Glasgow’s housing estates in the early 1990s. They should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all, and yet they become close friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon ‘doocot’ that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they find themselves falling in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, and Mungo works especially hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. But the threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable. When 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 get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.

Imbuing the everyday world of its characters with rich lyricism, Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo is a gripping and revealing story, both tender and brutal, about the bounds of masculinity, the push and pull of family, the violence faced by so many queer people, and the dangers of being different in a hyper-masculine world.

Douglas Stuart was born and raised in Glasgow. After studying at Heriot-Watt University School of Textiles and Design and then completing an MA at the Royal College of Art in London, he moved to New York where he began a career in design, having been scouted by someone from Calvin Klein at his graduation show. His debut novel Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize, the Fiction Debut Award and the overall Book of the Year award at the British Book Awards; it was shortlisted for numerous other awards in the US and the UK and is being published in over 40 territories (and counting) worldwide. Douglas is currently working on the script for the tv adaptation to be made by A24, and directed by Stephen Daldry. Douglas Stuart lives in New York with his husband.

Kirstin Innes’s debut novel, Fishnet, a nuanced and thoughtful exploration of contemporary sex work, won the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize in 2015. Her second novel, Scabby Queen (2020), which The Sunday Times called “a brilliant and beguiling state of the nation novel”, is currently being adapted for stage and screen. A former journalist, Kirstin twice won the Allen Wright Award for Excellence in Arts Journalism. She now has a fortnightly opinion column in The Press & Journal. Her first non-fiction book, Brickwork: A Biography of The Arches, co-written with David Bratchpiece, was published in November 2021.

We are planning for this event to take place in the bookshop with an in-person audience, as well as a livestream for attendees watching from home. On the night of the event, our team will be wearing masks and we encourage you to do the same, unless you are exempt. This will keep things as safe as possible for authors, audience members and our booksellers.

When you purchase a signed – and if requested, dedicated – copy of Young Mungo via the options below, you will also receive access to either the in-person event or the livestream. Please note that dedications are for names only. There is also an option to purchase a £3 voucher which provides access to the livestream. The voucher can be used on any item in the bookshop and on our website - including books by featured authors.