When he hears that his fierce, beautiful twin sister Savannah, a well-known New York poet, has once again attempted suicide, he escapes his present emasculation by flying north to meet Savannah's comely psychiatrist, Susan Lowenstein. Tom Wingo is an unemployed South Carolinian football coach whose internist wife is having an affair with a pompous cardiac man. What a writer.Ī flabby, fervid melodrama of a high-strung Southern family from Conroy ( The Great Santini, The Lords of Discipline), whose penchant for overwriting once again obscures a genuine talent.

Romantic, terrifying, brutal, tender, and, in the end, sneakily hopeful. 'They kept their chests puffed out until they could be safe in their mammies’ arms again where they could coorie into her side as she watched television and she would ask, 'What is all this, eh, what’s with all these cuddles?' and they would say nothing, desperate to just be boys again, wrapped up safe in her softness.' As in Shuggie Bain, the yearning for a mother's love is omnipresent, even on the battlefield. Even before Hamish gets wind of these goings-on, he too has decided to make Mungo a man, forcing him to participate in a West Side Story–type gang battle. But a same-sex relationship across the sectarian divide is so unthinkable that their every interaction is laced with fear.

Mungo has met a neighbor boy named James, who keeps racing pigeons in a 'doocot' the boys are kindred spirits and offer each other a tenderness utterly absent from any other part of their lives. This ultracreepy weekend plays out over the course of the book, interleaved with the events of the months before. Though everything about these men is alarming to Mungo, 'fifteen years he had lived and breathed in Scotland, and he had never seen a glen, a loch, a forest, or a ruined castle.' So at least there's that to look forward to. Mo-Maw's come by only to pack her gentle son off on a manly fishing trip with two disreputable strangers. Jodie has full responsibility for the household, as their older brother, Hamish, a Proddy warlord, lives with the 15-year-old mother of his child and her parents. As the book opens, Mungo's hard-drinking mother, Mo-Maw, is making a rare appearance at the flat where Mungo lives with his 16-year-old sister, Jodie. You wouldn't think you'd be eager to return to these harsh, impoverished environs, but again this author creates characters so vivid, dilemmas so heart-rending, and dialogue so brilliant that the whole thing sucks you in like a vacuum cleaner. The Sighthill tenement where Shuggie Bain (2020), Stuart's Booker Prize–winning debut, unfurled is glimpsed in his follow-up, set in the 1990s in an adjacent neighborhood. Two 15-year-old Glasgow boys, one Protestant and one Catholic, share a love against all odds.

Young mungo