At a glance
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 childhood: 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.
Don’t just take
our word for it
"Deceptively simple in his storytelling, Douglas Stuart builds a world that aches for truth and hungers for love. John of John is a father-son story, a love story, and ultimately a story about grace — the kind you extend to the people who failed you, to the places that couldn't hold you, and perhaps most difficultly, to yourself."
- Jason Blitman, Gays Reading Podcast
"To read John of John is to move to the Isle of Harris and take up residence in the family croft. The novel is so immersive, so all-encompassing, that I felt like I was living in it. Douglas Stuart has written something brilliant and rare."
- Ann Patchett
"Like Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, Douglas Stuart explores the visible and invisible chains of love forged between a parent and child—as each grapples with his respective faith and complex humanity. Stuart’s characters yearn and yield tenderly as they struggle with fate and free will. The inimitable world of John of John is passionate, liberating, and gorgeous.”
-Min Jin Lee, author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko, finalist for the National Book Award
