From the Booker-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo comes a vivid, moving, and beautifully crafted novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a close-knit community and a fraying family, of a father’s expectations and a son’s desires

Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for several decades. Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly knotted.

John of John is a singular novel about duty and patience and the transformative power of the truth. It is a magnificent literary work that shows Douglas Stuart working at an even higher level of artistic creation.

We’re not even six months into the year, and I think I may have already found my top read of it. This book is perfection. I don’t say that lightly.

I read Young Mungo by this author a couple of years ago and really liked it, even though the subject matter was brutal. Then again, I tend to gravitate to that type of book. I like the complexity of a character surviving tragedy. This one is still tragic, but in a completely different way. It’s a quieter kind of heartbreak, and it left me thinking about it for days after I closed it. Hell, I’m still thinking about it.

Cal is a young man who has come home with not much to show for himself. He went off to art school, racked up a ton of debt, evades his father’s constant calls to come home and visit. But then he ran out of money, and now he’s back on the island where he grew up, returning to a place that has barely changed even though he has. He grudgingly slots back into the life he left behind, out on the family farm, caught between the two people who shaped him. On one side is his father, John, who raises sheep and weaves tweed and is one of the most outwardly pious and respected men in the local church. On the other is his grandmother, Ella, a Glaswegian who swears like a sailor and has spent years in a shaky standoff with John. Cal is gay and closeted and spends his days wondering whether there’s anyone like him out in this remote, empty place, hoping for a connection that might change the trajectory of his life. Meanwhile, his father looks at him with growing dismay, put off by the length of his hair and the fact that he won’t give himself over to the faith, determined to save his son from a life that could wash him away in sin.

The heart of this book is the relationship between John and Cal, and it absolutely wrecked me. This is a story about how hard it is to be gay in a small, deeply religious town. It’s also a story about fathers and sons, and specifically about a father who holds his son to a standard the boy can never meet. What makes it so devastating is that John isn’t a cartoon villain. He genuinely loves Cal, and in his own twisted way, he thinks he’s protecting his son. He believes that if he forces his beliefs into Cal hard enough, he can save him from something worse. That’s the tragedy. The damage doesn’t come from hate. It comes from a love that’s been bent into something harmful by everything John was raised to believe.

The book is even more beautiful in that every character is tragic and deeply flawed. Some of their secrets took the air from my lungs when I discovered them and made me even more invested in the book. They’re also worthy of so much more than life handed them, and Stuart writes them with so much understanding that you can’t fully condemn any of them, even when they’re causing real harm. You’re going to feel a lot of complicated things reading this. You’ll be angry. You’ll be heartbroken. You’ll feel a strange tenderness for people who are hurting each other. And the remarkable thing is that you’ll understand every bit of it. The pain of these characters is so real and so intense that it practically bleeds off the page.

The prose is exquisite. I don’t throw that word around often, but it this book deserves the praise. The writing never shows off, it just quietly does its job, pulling you in and dragging you under.

I loved this book so much. If you can handle a story that hurts and heals, and you want writing that punches you in the soul, this one needs to be on your TBR. It’s beautiful and it’s hard and it’s stayed with me in a way that very few books do. It’s going to be tough for a book to come along and knock this one off the top of my list before the year is over.

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