So Many Fantastic Books Are Releasing In April, And Here Are Our Top Picks
—Rachel Strolleby Douglas StuartStuart’s debut novel, 2020’s Shuggie Bain, was an immersive, deeply compelling story about a working-class Scottish family and the matriarch Agnes’s debilitating alcohol addiction.
In his second novel, Stuart explores similar themes. Mungo Hamilton is 15, the youngest of three children; older brother Hamish is a local gangster who terrorizes Catholic adolescents, while sister Jodie is sleeping with her older teacher and dreaming of a life away from their council estate.
Their mother, Mo-Maw, meanwhile, has an alcohol addiction and is in and out of the house trying to date again after the death of her husband when Mungo was small.
Mungo strikes up a friendship with a fellow loner named James, who happens to be Catholic. As their intimacy deepens, the ramifications of their love converge in painful, inevitably violent ways. —Tomi Obaroby Jennifer EganPicking up where her 2010 Pulitzer-winning collection A Visit From the Goon Squad left off, Egan once again hopscotches characters, countries, and years in this book about a technological invention called Own Your Unconscious that allows people to upload their memories to the cloud.
