Authors' Notes: Douglas Stuart on John of John, tenderness as rebellion, and coming to reading later in life
We ask the Booker Prize winner about taking the reader to the Outer Hebrides, whether we can expect more heartbreak in his new novel, and what changed his relationship with books as a teenager.
Douglas Stuart is the prize-winning and million-copy bestselling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo, two deeply moving novels and vivid portrayals of working-class life in 1980s Glasgow. His third novel, John of John, is set in the Outer Hebrides, islands on the far west of the Scottish highlands, and is one of the most anticipated literary fiction books of 2026. We spoke to him about the importance of place, and love in his novels, what he looks for in a good book, and the experiences that turned him into a reader.
What drew you to set John of John in the Outer Hebrides?
John of John is a novel that I began writing in 2019. I went to the Outer Hebrides for twelve weeks, never having been before and also not knowing quite what I was searching for. I started at the southern tip of the archipelago and I traveled all the way to the tip of Lewis at the top. I was, I think, searching for a place where the characters felt most alive.
I knew that I wanted to write about loneliness. I wanted to write about the rural working class. I wanted to write about weaving – I am a weaver, I actually studied textiles at college – and when I got to Harris after being in lots of different places, that lunar landscape of the east coast of the island just felt so right for what I was trying to communicate. John of John is a story about generations. It's about a family holding on and loving each other. It's about patience and duty. And I found this really beautiful little white croft house in that part of the world and it just felt like I had come home.
Landscape affects everything in the novel. It is a novel about faith, and you can understand why faith is such an important thing there when you are so close to the sea and the sky and the land. It's a novel about time and about how generations weave together. And time has a very different feeling on the islands, because it is so controlled by the weather and by the seasons, and also sheep farming. Place informs people and people react to place, so they're just very intertwined for me.
‘I think when you write about softness, especially in a very masculine world, there is something a little subversive about that. The world is very suspicious of men who feel tender or who feel big feelings’
Do you see tenderness as a form of rebellion in your work?
I am drawn to tenderness in my novels. A lot of the social problems that my characters face or the challenges that come are often just to highlight the love that exists between them. Shuggie was about testing a son's love for his mother. Young Mungo is about the love between these two young men in a world that wants to divide them. I think when you write about softness, especially in a very masculine world, there is something a little subversive about that. The world is very suspicious of men who feel tender or who feel big feelings. And I feel sad about that, I think, and I want to push that in my novels. I want my characters to like love and to feel and to have big, big hearts. And so tenderness is always essential to my work.
John of John is already one of the most anticipated literary novels of 2026. What do you look for in a great novel?
For me, a great novel is always a book that feels like it costs the author something. Whether that's time or research or perhaps even a lived life; something that feels you can feel the human effort in the book, whatever that is, whatever form it takes. I like to spend time with a novel that feels like only that person could have written it and it could only exist because this person's life has been pulling them towards that moment.
‘We are, at the end of the day, just humans that are trying to connect with each other through literature. A novel where the characters really fully come to life, and feel like people that, when you close the last page of a book, you think 'don't go'. . . that makes a great novel for me.’
Great novels are all about characters. We are, at the end of the day, just humans that are trying to connect with each other through literature. A novel where the characters really fully come to life, and feel like people that, when you close the last page of a book, you think 'don't go', you know, or 'be OK in the world'. That's often something I look for, and that makes a great novel for me.
What will fans of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo recognise in John of John, and what might surprise them?
If you love Shuggie and Mungo then you will find that same sort of novel that looks at families and communities and characters that are struggling with their own sense of belonging in the only place that they could ever possibly belong. There is all of the heart and the hardship that comes with my former novels, but setting this one on the island, there's a gentleness, I think, that doesn't exist in an urban setting. There is a peacefulness, and a calm and a patience too, that I think will be entirely new for fans of my writing. It was such a pleasure to be in that world, because it is such an aesthetically beautiful world: so rich with colour and weather, and it's so redolent of this place that smells of salt and has this wild weather and wind. For me, as a writer who has predominantly written about the urban working class, this was just a very new thing and hopefully people will want to come to the Isle of Harris with me.
You’ve spoken about growing up feeling literature wasn’t ‘for the likes of you.’ What changed this?
I grew up in a house that didn't have many books. My family weren't big readers and we often felt very oppressed in a class setting, because Glasgow was a place that was very overlooked by Westminster, and literature felt like a very middle class thing that wasn't trying to talk to us in any sort of way. Then, to be really honest, as a young working-class boy we were also oppressing ourselves, because we would think that books were mostly for girls, and we were very afraid of anything that seemed effeminate.
‘I think in many ways it doesn't matter when the love of reading comes into your life. It can come at any time and it's always there for you.’
My awakening in books came when I was about sixteen. Two things happened that year that changed my life in many ways. The first was that my mother, who had been sick my whole childhood, died. And the second thing was that my school got very, very quiet. Of the 300 kids in my year, almost all of them left at age sixteen to go find work or to do something else. And this left only twelve of us in our year at school. So I found myself in an English class where I was the only student: the only student in a high school English class. I got about eight hours of instruction with these two teachers, Mr. Arthur and Mr. Archibald, and it was just so intense. There was no escaping. There was no way you could not do your homework. But they also managed to slow me down and to show me the beauty of books. To sit with someone who taught you not only what literature was, but also, in a way, how to read and to have that very intense relationship, changed everything for me.
Coming to books so late in life meant it was too late for me to think about going to college to study English, so I went on and studied something else. But that didn't mean that I wasn't a big reader my whole life and I didn't always love books. And so I think in many ways it doesn't matter when the love of reading comes into your life. It can come at any time and, especially for working-class men: it's always there for you, and we always want you to join us.
John of John
by Douglas Stuart
Why read this: This is the third book from the Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain and is just as emotionally rich and beautifully written as his earlier works. When John-Calum Macleod goes back to the Isle of Harris, he finds himself caught between his deeply rooted, religious father and his freer, more questioning sense of self. As tensions simmer within family and community, Stuart paints a vivid portrait of love, repression, and identity.
If you’re looking for: Literary fiction, books with a strong sense of place, LGBQTIA+ themes, lyrical writing.
Great for fans of: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart.
What the experts say: 'John of John has the emotional range and sense of sympathy of his earlier books, but this book is special, it has an urgency, an immediacy, a brilliant sense of place, the drama of fierce emotion repressed, concealed and volcanically exposed.' – Colm Tóibín, author of Long Island.
