BOOK REVIEW: JOHN OF JOHN By Douglas Stuart (Picador, 2026)
Earlier this year I read 'A Private View', a short story by Douglas Stuart published in The New Yorker. Stuart won the Booker Prize in 2020 for his novel Shuggie Bain followed by his novel Young Mungo in 2022. In the short story Stuart revisits some of the angst about losing his mother that he explored in Shuggie Bain. The story was poignant and heartbreaking, written with the quiet confidence of a writer who showed maturity and sensitivity. When John of John was published earlier this year, I knew it was a book I would definitely want to read.
John of John is set on the windswept island of Harris off the coast of Scotland. Cal, twenty-two, has just finished art school in Edinburgh when his father calls to say that his beloved grandmother Ella is unwell, and he reluctantly finds himself heading back home. Cal's father, John, is a strictly religious man who, alongside being a sheep farmer, weaves Harris tweed to supply to the mainland. Ella is Cal's maternal grandmother, who has stayed with John and Cal ever since Cal's mother, Grace, left to be with John's brother. This is the scandal at the heart of the novel, but there is more to it than at first meets the eye, and Stuart is very clever at slowly unravelling the truth. John is a strict, intolerant father whose expectations of firm propriety from his son lead to moments of extreme violence. Stuart renders it without flinching: 'he saw how his son's mouth knotted. How his front teeth cracked together, angry bubbles of spit pushing through the chipped enamel. He saw the black hair on his pale knuckles come away, first a scalded blood-filled red, and then in actual blood.' (p. 106) And yet, despite the evocations of the hardship and brutality of island life, Stuart brings forth a delicate relationship between father and son, who both harbour the secret of being gay. Over the course of the novel, father and son learn, haltingly, to speak to each other and to reinvent their relationship.
The novel is flooded with Stuart's beautiful prose, from his descriptions of the hardships of living in such an isolated community to his characters, who are at once funny and sad. His prose is elegant and sustained, the imagery so visceral that you feel the cold wind on your face, see the turbulent grey seas and feel the isolation as you read it. When Cal goes into his father's shed, where he keeps the loom, he notices the yarn shelf, 'the shelves were full of hundreds of yarns, all the romantic colours of Scotland; bracken and grouse, gorse and heather, rain and moss, the chafed red of a drunkards face, and pure bilious whitey. Amongst these were punkish hot pinks and acid yellows, violent tones that made people recoil until they saw the finished cloth and saw how skilfully John could mix sour greens with wheats and nightshades until it was a field of spring bluebells.' (p. 72) This is a fabulous piece of writing, evoking an entire landscape and its people through just a shelf of colourful yarns. Stuart also cleverly weaves the changing of ‘violent colours’ into ‘a field of spring bluebells’ as a symbolic change in their relationship, from brutality and an inability to engage to one of openness and love and acceptance. The same eye for colour turns to his description of John's friend and lover Innes: 'In that last shaft of sunlight, it was almost as if Innes's eyes were lit from behind, the dull, watery green alive with a thousand flecks of gold.' (p. 187)
'the shelves were full of hundreds of yarns, all the romantic colours of Scotland; bracken and grouse, gorse and heather, rain and moss, the chafed red of a drunkards face, and pure bilious whitey.’
John of John is a hefty novel of nearly 400 pages, and a few sections weighed heavy, with too many other characters drawing us away from the central characters and developments but perhaps I felt that way only because I longed to spend more time with his main characters. Having said that, John of John is a beautifully written book about love, loneliness and the weight of not being acknowledged for who you are. As a writer Stuart has come a long way from Shuggie Bain, both in craft and style. I would definitely recommend it, and I'm not surprised it has made the 2026 Booker shortlist.
JOHN OF JOHN by Douglas Stuart (Picador, 2026)