John of John by Douglas Stuart

From Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo comes a stunning new novel, John of John . Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his Glaswegian grandmother Ella, who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for decades. Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, 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 is poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly entangled. John of John is 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.