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Douglas Stuart’s new novel shows how unspoken secrets can ravage a family and a community.

By Francesco P. RaheOctober 12, 2026 By LARB

John of John by Douglas Stuart. Grove Press, 2026. 416 pages.Buy on Bookshop.orgBecome a member for 15% off at Bookshop.org

SCOTTISH WRITER Douglas Stuart’s most recent book opens with a quote from Donald Macleod’s The Living Past (2006): “Islanders the world over are born for exile. Islands give you a privileged childhood and then, once they’ve made you what you are, leave you with no place to express it.” This enigmatic epigraph telegraphs the conflicting tensions—between islands and the world beyond, between expression and repression—that form the core of Stuart’s new novel John of John.

The book chronicles several gay men’s struggles with the costs of self-expression in the fictional Scottish village of Falabay, on the remote Isle of Harris. There, Gaelic is the native language, English a suspicious mainlander import. This linguistic division seeps into the novel’s every social interaction, including in the home of its protagonist, John-Calum “Cal” Macleod. Cal’s father John prefers to speak Gaelic; Cal’s mainlander maternal grandmother Ella speaks English. The cold war between the two is dramatized in John’s dinnertime refusal to lapse into English, forcing Cal to toggle simultaneously between the two tongues. Cal’s chaotic dinners are indicative of a broader tendency that Stuart captures, as characters repeatedly use silence, hedging, and outright lies to avoid topics that are taboo in their Presbyterian milieu: premarital sex, drinking, dubious paternity, and, perhaps most relevant here, homosexuality.

At the novel’s start, Cal, age 22 and proudly gay, reluctantly returns to Falabay after learning his grandmother might be ill. Cal’s reluctance is partially attributable to John’s physical violence but more so to his homophobia. Midway through the book, Cal reflects that “his father didn’t believe gay people existed,” when, in secret, John himself is gay. Moreover, John is engaged in a decades-long love affair with his friend Innes—a relationship that, unbeknownst to Cal, broke up John’s marriage. John is aware of his son’s sexuality, but awareness is not the same as acceptance. John’s self-hatred envelops the book like a chilling fog, leaving Cal in the dark about his family history.

John of John is less concerned with the exposure of secrets than with living alongside known but unspoken truths. Nearly every plot thread in the book—from the contested ownership of John’s house to whether Cal’s chatty grandmother is actually ill—could be resolved with a simple conversation. But always in Falabay, words are swallowed back, questions dodged. Feelings linger in the descriptions and the most understated of actions, stubbornly refusing to migrate into direct dialogue. The veracity of Ella’s sickness becomes dubious early on, but it is only by the novel’s close that characters express their doubts out loud. As readers discover, Ella tricked John into believing she was ill so that he would call Cal home—something both she and John want, but which he would never admit to.

John’s smothered self-expression lies at the heart of the novel. He is a man so repressed that, even in private, his lover must propose physical intimacy indirectly, by requesting help with a household chore. John’s reticence stifles everyone around him, such that when characters finally do speak up, it can feel explosively cathartic. As Ella explains to John: “Islands within islands […] within islands, within islands. […] D’you know how hard it is for there to be somethin’ sittin’ in the middle of the room but for every scunner to go around pretendin’ they don’t see it?” Explosive is the operative word here, as “it was the quiet, loch-deep rage of the islanders [that Ella] found terrifying.” John may struggle to express love, but he easily expresses anger. After Cal shows up late to church, hair long and Walkman blaring, John beats him to a bloody pulp.

John’s barely contained rage, and that of his fellow islanders, is not merely personal but part of a larger societal collapse. Falabay’s weaving industry is declining thanks to the rise of fast fashion in the United States, its beloved church is set to close soon, and its native tongue of Gaelic was beaten out of John as a schoolboy, derided by his teacher as the tongue of peasants. Silence, in this context, can be a weapon but also an act of self-preservation, even of love. The novel asks the reader to appraise silence: When is it wisdom? When is it cowardice? When—if ever—does the cost become too steep?

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In a conversation with Innes, John, devoted to Falabay and terrified of the community’s judgment, characterizes his island experience as living like “rats in a bucket.” He feels trapped with his failures and incapable of finding any escape. In this narrative, Falabay’s discourse is a prison, stifling John’s own words until they contort into violence, as when he beats his son for embarrassing him in front of the women at church.

However, Stuart presents Falabay as much more than a stereotypical ignorance-plagued small town. It is a place as loving and beautiful as it is oppressive—a place where, to return to the book’s opening quotation, a childhood might even be called privileged. Falabay’s beauty lies in the isle’s rugged slopes and seaside, described in stunning, faith-laden terms by Stuart, and in its abiding sense of family and community. When an islander boy dies, the whole congregation shows up to support his family.

John is a homebody, but Innes dreams of traveling, of seeing new places. Yet Innes’s view of the island is less despairing than John’s. He perceives it as a fishbowl: “[Y]ou had to learn to live with your disappointments and your shames,” he figures, “because if you thought you had left them behind, you would only swim back around and be hurt all over again.” This metaphor calls not for repression but for recovery. Innes is described by John as having “a face of the islands,” by Cal as “a man made of island bones.” These descriptors suggest that Innes embodies the island’s beauty as much as John epitomizes its oppressiveness. They also imply that John’s problems, real as they are, cannot be blamed entirely on his community.

At the literal midpoint of the novel, John visits a community center where a therapist recognizes his need to talk to someone and promises confidentiality. John is leery. He reflects that “in his world there was nothing, not a single thing, that he did that did not provoke an outcome. Every word was a seed, and every seed could grow terrible fruits.” Nevertheless, after some pressing, John confesses everything: his deep love for Innes, his fears about how his son might react to those feelings, and—at last—his suicidal ideation.

This is a sobering moment, serving as John’s first real admission of vulnerability. Yet Stuart chooses not to turn John’s confession into a moment of transformation. Despite his candor, John reflects that “he had told this stranger the things he had told no one else and he felt no better for it.”

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If John is the quietest of the book’s characters, then his mainlander mother-in-law is certainly the loudest. Ella merrily prattles to the sheep while cleaning the croft; “alone, against the shush of the sea,” she gleefully taught young Cal profanities. Despite this seeming division between Ella and the island, Stuart does not present her as a condescending outsider. Her colloquial Glaswegian English is “nothing like English at all.” And while her chattiness is seemingly stymied by John’s habit of using Gaelic at dinner, she responds in that very tongue after John berates her near the novel’s end. Stuart typically indicates usage of Gaelic with italics, but here, he leaves Ella’s words to John untranslated: “Carson nach urra … urrainn … dhut a bhith toilichte?” In English: “Why can’t you be happy?”

Ella’s haunting question suggests that the real problem, which John of John gestures at through its titular antihero, is neither Falabay nor silence itself, but rather the incapacity to express oneself. Anyone who has ever been hugged knows the difference between the unspoken and the unexpressed; it is possible to convey “I love you” without ever using those words.

The taciturn culture of Falabay does not preclude indirect expressions of affection. After all, when Ella fell pregnant with Cal’s mother, it was an islander—Calum, his grandson’s namesake—who married Ella knowing the child was not his. Calum confessed his awareness that she was pregnant obliquely, “saying he knew a thing or two about ewes and their rhythms,” and Ella’s gratitude for his discretion remains long after his death.

Ella’s halting Gaelic words are largely left for the reader to decipher. These rare exchanges tend to be unremarkable: a reference to Cal’s college education, an affectionate goodnight. While exact meanings might be unspecified, what these exchanges usually entail is clear: Ella loves her grandson.

And though Falabay might resemble rats in a bucket to him, John still appreciates its ineffable glory. On a day at the beach, he feels “like an absolved man imagining himself surrounded by a bright white light […] if all this beauty existed, then it was no great leap of faith to believe there must also be a heaven.” Near the novel’s close, John, too, speaks in untranslated Gaelic, offering his son a proverb that Cal understands to be a moment of comfort and intimacy.

These moments of indirect affection are touching, yet vanishingly rare. By the novel’s close, it is unclear if John will ever be willing to take the risks needed to be happy. Yet, through young Cal, Stuart allows hope. Cal is John’s son: early in the book, he ghosts a boyfriend rather than face the conflict of breaking up with him, and when Ella asks him point-blank if he is gay, he lies. But Cal is also named after the selfless, loving Calum, such that when Cal’s childhood friend Isla struggles with unexpected motherhood, he secretly gives her money to get to the mainland.

It is this second tendency within Cal, the unspoken used as an act of love, that fuels the ending of the book, when the son encourages the father to be with the man he loves, without ever saying it out loud. Cal’s indirectness succeeds as an act of kindness in a situation where confrontation would have equaled cruelty. It allows John of John to end on a ray of hope, with the men of Falabay bound to their island, to the world beyond, and to one another.

“We’re islanders,” Innis tells Cal. “We’re built for leaving. We’re made to be left.” These words, particular to Falabay, touch on the universal. No human is left unshaped by their community; all of us experience feelings that are nearly impossible to express. Yet secrets can someday become spoken, or shared, if one only waits for contexts to change and communities to catch up. John of John suggests that all we can do in the meantime is love those around us beyond mere speech, leaving space when words cannot be found.

LARB Contributor

Francesco Rahe is an MPhil student in Islamic studies and history at Oxford.