Dear BookBrowsers,
Douglas Stuart's debut novel
Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize in 2020, along with tremendous critical acclaim; so his second novel
Young Mungo was widely anticipated and is more than living up to expectations. It follows protagonist Mungo Hamilton as he comes of age in Glasgow's East End in the 1980s, an environment marked by poverty and casual violence.
Audrey Magee's
The Colony is set on an Irish island in the 1970s during "the Troubles," an extended sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholics. Both
Young Mungo and
The Colony take place during a time of instability and conflict, and the accompanying Beyond the Book articles inform and intersect with one another.
In the article
Colonization and the Irish Language, we track the decline of the Irish language over centuries. One of the key reasons for this decline was the Great Famine in the 1840s, which killed over one million people and triggered waves of emigration. Many fled the famine for Scotland, and in the article
Religious Sectarianism in Glasgow: Then and Now, we look at how these new arrivals exacerbated conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Scotland, an issue that continues to plague the region in the present day.
We also review Jenny Tinghui Zhang's historical novel
Four Treasures of the Sky, and Aamina Ahmad's emotionally resonant detective novel set in Lahore,
The Return of Faraz Ali, both of which are debuts that earned 5-star ratings from our reviewers.
In addition to the 16 reviews in this issue, we have a new
Wordplay,
previews for upcoming releases, and much more. If you haven't already, make sure to check out
our interview with the CEO of Vivat, a publisher in Ukraine working to maintain operations during the Russian invasion.
As always, thank you for reading BookBrowse.
Davina Morgan-Witts
BookBrowse Publisher
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