We are absolutely delighted to welcome Douglas Stuart to the Birmingham to talk about his next novel, ‘John Of John‘ which is released in May 2026. Douglas will be in conversation with author, Andrew McMillan. This event will be at The CBSO Centre.
Douglas will be in conversation for around one hour and we will also take questions from the audience. This will be followed by a book signing (copies of ‘John of John’ will be available on the night)
Douglas Stuart was born and raised in Glasgow. After graduating from the Royal College of Art, he moved to New York where he began a career in fashion design. Shuggie Bain, his first novel, won the Booker Prize and both Debut of the Year and Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Award, and in 2025 was selected by The Sunday Times as one of the ‘best novels of the twenty-first century’ as well as one of the ten best Booker winners of all time by the Daily Telegraph. His second novel, Young Mungo, was a number one Sunday Times bestseller. His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, and ‘Love, Hope & Grit’, the Imagine documentary Douglas made with the late Alan Yentob, is available on the BBC iPlayer. Douglas Stuart lives in New York.
John of John
Everything he owned fit into a backpack and one doubled bin bag. It had taken him less than ten minutes to pack up four years of his life. It had taken a little longer to fold himself away, to hide all the bits of himself that had slowly been unfurling since he had arrived on the mainland. In truth, he had not changed that much since he had been at college, and as he roamed the ferry he wondered if he had always known he would be forced to come home eventually.
Out of money and with little to show for his art school years on the mainland, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home, called back by his father to the island of Harris. In the windswept croft in which he grew up, Cal reluctantly resumes his old life, caught between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, weaver, and pillar of the local Presbyterian church, and his Glaswegian grandmother Ella who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for decades.
While Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the island’s hillsides, back in a tight-knit Hebridean community where talk is both social currency and a tool for control, and where a rigid adherence to Presbyterian faith clashes with the unspoken desires of its inhabitants, John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and seeming unwillingness to be Saved. As the seasons pass, everything is poised to change as the threads holding the community together become
increasingly entangled, In a narrative both tender and unflinching, Douglas Stuart continues and deepens his exploration of masculinity and the silent struggle of lives lived under a watchful, judgmental eye. John of John examines the weight of family expectation, the painful compromises people make for love, the lies they tell themselves and one another in order to survive, and the profound cost of a life unlived. It confirms Douglas Stuart’s reputation as one of the most vital voices in contemporary fiction.
Andrew McMillan was born in Barnsley in 1988. His debut collection of poetry, physical, was ‘the sort of once-in-a-generation debut that causes everyone to sit up and take notice’ according to Sarah Crown. physical was the only poetry book to ever win the Guardian First Book Award; it was also awarded a Somerset Maugham award, an Eric Gregory Award, the Aldeburgh First Collection Prize and in 2019 was voted as one of the Top 25 Poetry Books of the Past 25 Years by the Booksellers Association. His second collection, playtime, won the inaugural Polari Prize. A third collection, pandemonium, was published in 2021 and in 2022 he co-edited the acclaimed anthology 100 Queer Poems, which was shortlisted in the British Book Awards. He is professor of contemporary writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. His debut novel, Pity, was published by Canongate in 2024, and was named as one of the top 20 books of 2024 by The Independent. It has been translated into numerous languages including Norwegian, Swedish, French, German, Turkish and Slovak.
This event will take place at The CBSO Centre.
The Heath Bookshop