Set in the small Scottish Outer Hebrides Island of Lewis and Harris, John of John was written by Douglas Stewart, author of the Booker Award-winning Shuggie Bain.
While both novels deal with difficulties of being gay and poor in small Scottish towns, Shuggie Bain focused on a gay child's relationship with his mother while John of John takes as its central relationship and major conflict a young gay man dealing with his highly religious father. There's a significant irony in this relationship, one I will leave unmentioned as it's a spoiler.
The character of John and his son Cal are well developed, with complex inner lives. Besides Stewart’s strong prose and keen sense of observation, what I most liked was the immersion into this culture of farming sheep and making wool for the American market. The final element I enjoyed was Stewart's great sense of humor.
LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE • AN OPRAH'S BOOK CLUB PICK • AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“This excavation of family, violence and shame is woven through with beautiful imagistic detail, and—unexpectedly—shades of hope. We loved the rich, textural detail of the story.”—The Booker Prize 2026 judges
“Douglas Stuart brilliantly weaved a layered, compelling and yet so intimate a story of identity, what it means to belong, and the courage to claim your own truth.”—Oprah Winfrey
“One of 2026's literary triumphs.”—Boston Globe
From the Booker Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo comes…
Having read this book in my undergraduate days, I thought I'd give it a second reading over half a century later.
Part of my intention was to see how well Steinbeck's criticism of capitalism during the Great Depression aligned with the cultural and economic conditions of today. I was pleasantly surprised to find that Steinbeck's focus on the "monsters" of the banking institutions of the Depression are very much relevant to today’s hedge-fund and tech billionaire economy.
I was also struck by the power of his characters to, as Faulkner phrased it, endure. A book that, while seeming dated in some respects, is as relevant today as it was nearly a century ago.
'I've done my damndest to rip a reader's nerves to rags, I don't want him satisfied.'
Shocking and controversial when it was first published, The Grapes of Wrath is Steinbeck's Pultizer Prize-winning epic of the Joad family, forced to travel west from Dust Bowl era Oklahoma in search of the promised land of California. Their story is one of false hopes, thwarted desires and powerlessness, yet out of their struggle Steinbeck created a drama that is both intensely human and majestic in its scale and moral vision.
Before this, I had not read anything by the Irish writer Sally Rooney.
At first, I didn’t find her characters or the slow pace of the plot very appealing. But I stuck with the novel because I liked the two main characters—brothers who have recently lost their father. The older brother is a civil rights lawyer who is often very uncivil, both to his brother and to his several lovers. The younger brother is a chess prodigy who is on the spectrum and lacks any social skills.
Not only did I find the characters and Rooney's style to be compelling, I appreciated how she drew me into the plot by slow degrees. This is one of those books that requires the reader to be patient, a patience that will pay the reader with a powerful story of brotherly love.
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | A National Indie Bestseller
An exquisitely moving story about grief, love, and family―but especially love―from the global phenomenon Sally Rooney.
Aside from the fact that they are brothers, Peter and Ivan Koubek seem to have little in common.
Peter is a Dublin lawyer in his thirties―successful, competent, and apparently unassailable. But in the wake of their father’s death, he’s medicating himself to sleep and struggling to manage his relationships with two very different women―his enduring first love, Sylvia, and Naomi, a college student for whom life is one long joke.
With echoes of To Kill a Mockingbird and Huck Finn, Skunktown tells the powerful story of twelve-year-old Lyman Polly, who must come to grips with racism while experiencing first love. Set during the turbulent summer of 1968 in a small New England town, the novel is told by the adult Lyman to his hospice nurse as he lies near death. He’s carried his “terrible secret” for over half a century and before he dies he wants to tell the true story of Maddy Skanks, a brilliant black girl who taught him about literature and jazz, about growing up Black in America, and most importantly, to trust his heart. When tragedy strikes, Lyman is first considered the prime suspect of the crime, but soon he takes it upon himself to find the real killer and places himself at the center of a deadly game.
