Margins
John of John book cover
John of John
2026
First Published
4.72
Average Rating
300
Number of Pages

From the Booker-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo comes a vivid, moving, and beautifully crafted novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a close-knit community and a fraying family, of a father’s expectations and a son’s desires. Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for several decades. Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly knotted. John of John is a singular novel about duty and patience and the transformative power of the truth. It is a magnificent literary work that shows Douglas Stuart working at an even higher level of artistic creation.

Avg Rating
4.72
Number of Ratings
233
5 STARS
75%
4 STARS
22%
3 STARS
2%
2 STARS
0%
1 STARS
0%
goodreads

Author

Douglas Stuart
Douglas Stuart
Author · 4 books

Douglas Stuart is a Scottish - American author. His work has been translated into 40 languages. His debut novel, Shuggie Bain, is the winner of the 2020 Booker Prize. It won the Sue Kaufman award from The American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Book of the Year, and the Debut of the Year at the British Book Awards in 2021. It was also Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year. Shuggie Bain was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, the Pen Hemingway Award, the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, The Rathbones Folio, the LA Times Art Seidenbaum Award, and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize. His second novel, Young Mungo, was a #1 Sunday Times Bestseller, a finalist for the Carnegie Medal, the British Book of the Year (Fiction), the Polari prize. His short stories have been published by The New Yorker. His essays on Gender, Class and Anxiety are featured on Lit Hub. Born in Glasgow, Scotland, after receiving his MA from the Royal College of Art in London, he has lived and worked in New York City. Follow him on instagram at Douglas_Stuart or Twitter at Doug_D_Stuart

548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2026 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved