John of John by Douglas Stuart review – will a father and son come out to each other?

The Booker winner’s epic tale of gay love and loneliness in the Hebrides charts an uneasy homecoming against a backdrop of repression There’s a common greeting in the Outer Hebrides: the lineage-establishing “Who do you belong to?” By the time this question is posed to 22-year-old gay Harris islander John-Calum Macleod, or Cal, in Douglas Stuart’s new novel, there is a sense that Cal is his father John’s beyond the ordinary claims of blood – the latter’s sway containing undercurrents of domin...

By Yagnishsing Dawoor