A huge thank you to the amazing Douglas Stuart for his funny, warm and insightful conversation with Kirsty Walk about his new book, John of John. 

They discussed the complex relationship between father and son, between sexuality and religion and how secrets held from loved ones can change the course of a life. The audience fell quiet as Stuart read a passage about the beauty of weaving, using colours of the Harris landscape and the warmth and distance that resides between Cal and his father. 

‘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.’

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.

‘…this book is special, it has an urgency, an immediacy, a brilliant sense of place, the drama of fierce emotion repressed, concealed and volcanically exposed.’ – COLM TÓIBÍN

‘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

‘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