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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

Taste the very first page

Her feet were as purple as calf liver. That’s what his father had said before he hung up. Cal had been standing in the red phone box at the bottom of the Meadows, watching the rugby players stretch on the lush green grass. Their white shorts clung to their haunches, and in the soft smirr the cloth became sheer and he could see the elasticated lines of their briefs. He was only half-listening as his father read from the New Testament.

His father had never been fond of small talk. This gave their telephone calls the feeling of a service line, like when you dialled the Speaking Clock and then reset your watch to it. When Cal mentioned this to his father, the truth of it made his father laugh, for John Macleod believed the spirit was indeed in need of constant calibration, and Cal made his calibrations every Wednesday at 6 p.m. prompt and twice again on the Sabbath.

He couldn’t afford the long-distance call to the isles so they developed a signalling system where he would call home at the agreed-upon hour, wait for three pips, and then hang up. His father would immediately call back. This required turning up early and pretending to talk to someone so no passer-by could block the telephone.

It had taken some time to find the perfect place to worship, a solitary phone box that wasn’t back-to-back with another. When his father precented the psalm, the expectation was Cal would sing it back to him in Gaelic with the full power of his belief. But when a particularly handsome man would stroll past he would cringe and lower his voice and, without fail, John would ask him why he was wavering. It was mortifying to deal with the glances of passing strangers. For this reason, he spent a good portion of their time together with his eyes closed or with his back turned to the path. He found he did his best singing while his fingers searched the calling cards left by the prostitutes and masseuses.

For all that, he liked the Meadows. The rolling fields helped slow his mind. It was one of the few spaces where the city took a breath, and he found it helped match the rhythm of his thoughts to his father’s unhurried talk. He knew his father was staring out at the sea.

“Ciamar a tha thu an-diugh?” his father asked in Gaelic. And how are you today?

May 2026