Young Mungo

Growing up in a Glasgow housing estate, James and Mungo are born under different stars—James is a Catholic, while Mungo is a Protestant—and if they are to be considered men at all, they should be sworn enemies. Despite all the obstacles, they manage to become the best of friends as they take refuge in James's pigeon dovecote, which he constructed for his prize racing pigeons.

While Mungo tries hard to conceal his real personality from everyone around him, particularly from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang boss with a violent reputation to maintain, they fall in love and dream of finding someplace they belong. Mungo will need to muster all of his inner strength and courage to try to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future, when his mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland several months later with two strange men whose drunken banter belies murky pasts.

Young Mungo is a compelling and illuminating story about the boundaries of masculinity, the divisions of sectarianism, the violence faced by many queer people, and the perils of loving someone too much. It does this by infusing the everyday lives of its characters with rich lyricism and by giving full voice to people who are rarely acknowledged in the literary world.