Our score
Outstanding
John of John: A Novel
Douglas Stuart's John of John is a Hebridean coming-of-age novel about a young gay man who returns to his father's croft and finds that the silence he grew up in has a cost for everyone, not just him. Fans of literary fiction built on family duty and buried truth will find this one hard to shake.
From the review
John Macleod is dying by inches long before anyone in this novel says so out loud, and it takes his son coming home to notice. Cal, christened John-Calum after his father, gets off the ferry to the Isle of Harris broke, unfinished with art school, and braced for the version of himself the island has always demanded: quieter, shorter-haired, straighter. His father John, sheep farmer and tweed weaver and a lay preacher who treats Scripture like load-bearing wall, has never stopped waiting for that version to show up. Between them sits Ella, Cal's grandmother, a Glaswegian transplant who swears like a docker and loves without any of John's conditions attached, and whose failing health is the excuse everyone uses for why Cal has actually come back. Stuart, who won the Booker for Shuggie Bain, knows exactly how much weight a household can carry before someone in it breaks, and he builds this one slowly, croft chore by croft chore, until you can feel the floor bowing.
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