Reading time: About 2 minutes
Douglas Stuart tackles complex and challenging family dynamics. And he does so in a deeply evocative way…..
Scottish-American writer Douglas Stuart rocketed to fame in 2020 when he won the Booker Prize for his bestselling novel Shuggie Bain. I couldn’t bring myself to read it because so many friends had told me it was bleak and depressing with no sense of redemption.
Still, I was eager to learn more about this award-winning writer, so when his 2026 novel, John of John, also earned rave reviews (and I was reassured it was more redemptive) I picked it up. All I can say is, remarkable! This is one of the best books I’ve read all year. In the book, a son, John-Calum, returns to the home of his sheep-farming father, another John, in rural Scotland. Fresh from four years at art college, John junior struggles to find common ground with John senior. It is a rich and multilayered story, exploring duty and patience with loving care.
Stuart’s command of figurative language is unparalleled. Here are my favourite examples:
- He was wearing a lime green knitted cap, a color so acidic it could ruin appetites.
- John MacLeod. It was a name as common as white sheep.
- Cal could imagine his grandmother swooping, circling John like a gull on a fishing boat.
- [Her feet] were swollen, spilling over her orthopedic sandals like dough leavened with too much yeast.
- As Ella buttoned her good coat she wondered if it was still, in fact, her good coat. The seams were fraying under the armpits and the red lining needed to be pinned in place or else it hung beneath her hemline, wagging like a pervert’s tongue.
- She returned them [clothes] to the brown bag and the last dress shimmered in the blackness, bright as a moonlit puddle.
- She was a small nervous woman who perched on a large burgundy cushion like a storybook mouse.
- He had the musty smell of a damp cloth that had not been wrung out properly.
- John had watched as he had beckoned Cal forward with a pantomime worthy of Wonka and then opened the door like it was a gateway to Narnia.
- There was nothing worth looking at, still their gaze fluttered around the room like two birds unable to settle or land.
- Cal had given his bed to his father and was lying on the floor, on a length of couch cushions that had separated like ice flows pulling apart.
- Cal didn’t watch his father shake the men’s hands but he heard their callouses rub together like fine-grain sandpaper.
- He saw his father and he deflated, as though John’s arrival was an end to all the fun, as sure as a buzzer, as sure as the pennies running out on the supermarket pony.
- He caught the giggle in his throat and it trembled like a chirrup, like a bird at the bottom of a well.
- The sunlight made the sea shimmer like hammered tin.
[Photo by Librairie Mollat under the Creative Commons License option 3.0.]
