![]() ![]() The latter chapters are fuelled by the everyday tumult of Mungo’s home life the former are more mysterious. Unlike in Shuggie Bain, the action spans months rather than years, the narrative alternating between ‘The May After’ and ‘The January Before’. His brother, Hamish, a gang leader with a baby by an underage girl, sells drugs out of her mother’s mouse-ridden council flat his sister, Jodie, is being groomed by her secondary-school teacher, a married man who likes ‘to pick his nose after they fucked and wipe it on the underside of the veneer’ of a fold-out table in the caravan he takes her to. ![]() Mungo, fifteen, is the youngest of three children raised by single mother Maureen, or Mo-Maw, who is barely twice his age and has been absent for long stretches no one remembers his stabbed father. ![]() Young Mungo takes place in the early 1990s on a violent East End estate high on sugar and booze. Stuart has been open about the book’s relationship to his own background, but while you can’t really write a misery memoir twice, nothing stops a novelist from having a stamping ground. Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize two years ago for his first novel, Shuggie Bain, which is set in 1980s Glasgow and follows a boy who, ill at ease with the burds-and-fitba chat on his housing scheme, struggles to take care of his alcoholic mother, Agnes. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |