We’re delighted to welcome back to Manchester Literature Festival Booker Prize-winning novelist Douglas Stuart, to discuss his profoundly moving new novel John of John, set on the Isle of Harris.

Returning home after his art school years on the mainland, John-Calum Macleod is drawn back into a tightly bound Hebridean community shaped by faith, silence and watchful scrutiny. Caught between his devout father John, sheep farmer and weaver, and his Glaswegian grandmother, Cal navigates desire and masculinity. As the seasons change, the fragile balance holding family and community together is threatened.

Tender, immersive and unflinching, John of John explores the weight of family expectation, the compromises demanded by love and the devastating cost of lives constrained by silence.

This is a unique opportunity to hear from one of the most vital voices in contemporary fiction.

‘John of John has the emotional range and sense of sympathy of Douglas Stuart’s earlier novels, but this book is special, it has an urgency, an immediacy, a brilliant sense of place.’ Colm Tóibín

‘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

Douglas Stuart was born and raised in Glasgow and now lives in New York. After graduating from the Royal College of Art, he began a career in fashion design. His debut novel Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize and the British Book Awards’ Debut and Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the National Book Award. His second novel, Young Mungo, was a number one Sunday Times bestseller, and his work has appeared in The New Yorker.

Presented in partnership with the Centre for New Writing and Creative Manchester.