#7 in Literary fiction
Young Mungo
- 432
- Pages
- about 8 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“Young Mungo” is a heavy, deeply moving novel about first love between two boys in a Glasgow of poverty, neglect and religious division. Douglas Stuart sets the tenderness between Mungo and James against a brutality that keeps closing in, and the result is a hard book to get through and a powerful one, far from a gentle coming-of-age romance. Some find its moments of kindness more easily overwhelmed than in Stuart’s first novel.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Young Mungo is a 2022 novel by Scottish-American writer Douglas Stuart. It was published by Grove Press on 5 April 2022 and by Picador on 14 April 2022. The novel follows Mungo Hamilton, a teenager navigating a life of poverty and parental neglect in the early 1990s Glasgow. When the character falls in love with a boy named James, he must confront the homophobia, toxic masculinity, and religious conflicts of the society of his time. It is Stuart's second novel, following his Booker Prize-winning debut Shuggie Bain (2020). The novel was critically acclaimed and was chosen as one of the best books of the year by publications such as The Washington Post, Time, Reader's Digest, The Telegraph, and Vanity Fair.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.6 across 203 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 58% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Literary fiction average of 8.1. That is how 8.4 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardcover | 8.6 | 203 | 100% |
Frequently asked
How long is Young Mungo?
It has 432 pages — longer than 63% of the ranked books in Literary fiction.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Literary fiction — with scores between 8.2 and 8.5, closest to this book.
