Across the 800 pages of his two novels, 2020’s *Shuggie Bain* and, now, *Young Mungo,* Douglas Stuart has been inking a great Hogarthian print, a postmodern Scottish Gin Lane.

From Glasgow, with Love and Struggle

By Thomas Mallon

Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart

Shuggie Bain (2020), Douglas Stuart’s Booker Prize–winning first novel, was such a stunning amalgam of tenderness and brutality that a reader braces for a letdown from a follow-up appearing as quickly as Young Mungo now does.

Some broad repetitions do, for a while, threaten the possibility of a fresh impact from this second book, which Stuart admits was written “in between” drafts of the first.