Our critics’ top picks for the month include novels about a dystopian tech future, feuding visitors to a remote Irish island, and teenage boys falling in love in conflict-riven 90s Glasgow.
Mungo is 15 and struggles to live up to the hypermasculine ideals of his community. When he meets an equally sensitive James, his stirring sexuality is finally given a focus — and together they delight in their small oasis of exploration and acceptance, despite the danger of being discovered. As we're told, "there's nothing more shameful than being a poofter; powerless, soft as a woman".
Young Mungo is not just a worthy successor to Shuggie Bain, it's an astonishingly accomplished novel in its own right. SLHeti’s other books include two works of autofiction: How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood. Heti aims – as we all should – to discover enchantment in a disenchanted world, to see beneath the surface of things, dispensing, for the most part, with potted biographies and scene-setting. She writes in a mode that can turn from earnestness to eyebrow-raising drollery in a trick . It's endearing and it's brave and it's something we might hope to see more of in fiction.
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