Young Mungo Douglas Stuart (Picador, £16.99)
The Candy House Jennifer Egan (Corsair, £20)
Winter Love Han Suyin (McNally Editions, £13.50)
LAST MONTH I WROTE ABOUT the risk to new writers of growing up in public. Douglas Stuart, whose first novel Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize in 2020, has found a neat way of minimising this: by the time Shuggie won, he had already written his second novel, and so the pressure of following a bestselling prize-winner — it sold half a million copies in its first six months — is, if not eradicated, at least kicked into the long grass.
When I interviewed Stuart after his Booker win, his second novel was to be called . Its retitling to may be an attempt to make it chime more familiarly for fans of . And it’s true that there are enough overlapping elements — perm three from Glasgow housing estates, gay teenager, alcoholic mother, social conservatism, the 80s and 90s, violent men and
