Young Mungo

In working-class Glasgow in the 1990s, we meet Mungo. He is seventeen, Protestant, falling in love with Catholic James. It's a love story, as well as a story about wanting to be softer in a world of hyper-masculinity and rigid social divides.

Young Mungo is not an easy book, but I wouldn't call it fully dark either. Reading it, you know early on that things are unlikely to end well. And yet, I kept on hoping. I hoped for Mungo and James and that they might find a way out of the place and identities where the world locked them in. Or, that the world might soften just enough to make room for them where they were. That tension kept me gripped all the way through.

What stays with me is how real it all feels. The portrait of a divided Glasgow, the weight of expectation on young men, the tenderness between two boys who were never supposed to find each other. And between two boys who have not had any space or place to learn what tenderness and intimacy can look like.

I would recommend this to anyone who loves realistic, gripping fiction. The kind of book where the characters feel so alive you forget they aren't real, and where the story pulls you forward even when part of you is bracing for what's coming.