Books like Young Mungo
A queer teenager in 1990s Glasgow falls for a Protestant boy, and the sectarian violence of the city mirrors the violence inside his home.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Young Mungo
John of John
In the late 1990s, John-Calum, a twenty-two-year-old art school graduate, comes home to the family croft on the Isle of Harris when his father, a weaver and a deacon in a strict Presbyterian church, summons him with news that his grandmother is dying, though she seems in no hurry to go.
Shuggie Bain
In 1980s Glasgow, Shuggie, a gentle, different boy, devotes his childhood to saving his glamorous mother Agnes from the drinking that is destroying her, as poverty closes in around them.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Jeanette, adopted by a Pentecostal mother in a Lancashire mill town and raised to be a missionary, falls in love with another girl, and her church sets out to drive the demon out of her.
We the Animals
Three brothers run wild in upstate New York, sons of a Puerto Rican father and a white mother from Brooklyn whose love for each other is as volatile as it is fierce.
Funny Boy
Arjie, a Tamil boy growing up in Colombo in the 1970s and 80s, discovers he is gay as the tensions that will become Sri Lanka's civil war tighten around his family.
The Great Believers
In 1980s Chicago, art gallery director Yale Tishman watches the AIDS epidemic take his friends, and in 2015 Fiona, the sister of one of them, searches Paris for her estranged daughter.
Giovanni's Room
An American in 1950s Paris confronts his homosexuality through a love affair with an Italian man, and the novel's claustrophobic intensity mirrors the impossibility of the closet.
Last Exit to Brooklyn
Linked stories of longshoremen, hustlers, transvestites, and strikers in 1950s Red Hook Brooklyn, told in unpunctuated bursts that broke American obscenity law and then the English sentence.
Stone Butch Blues
Jess Goldberg, a working-class Jewish child in 1950s Buffalo who doesn't fit as a girl, comes of age as a butch in the gay bars and factories of the 1960s, through police raids and union fights.
The Crow Road
Home for a funeral, student Prentice McHoan starts looking into the disappearance of his uncle Rory, a writer who vanished years before, in a novel that is part mystery, part family saga and part love letter to Argyll.
How Late It Was, How Late
Sammy, a Glasgow ex-con, wakes up in a lane after a two-day drinking binge, gets into a fight with the police and comes round in a cell, blind.
Trainspotting
Renton, Sick Boy, Begbie, and Spud run together through heroin-era 1980s Leith in a novel written out in the Edinburgh that English-reading publishing had previously been allowed to leave out.