Yahoo News A24 Reteams With ‘Shuggie Bain’ Author Douglas Stuart For ‘Young Mungo’ TV Series
EXCLUSIVE: The first new A24 project to emerge since the studio’s record-breaking Oscar haul last week is international TV series Young Mungo, which is being adapted by Scottish-American author Douglas Stuart from his acclaimed novel.
The series, about the dangerous first love of two working class men in Glasgow, is being shepherded by A24’s international heads Piers Wenger and Rose Garnett, and marks a coup for the pair given the stellar reviews and buzz around its author.
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Published last year, Young Mungo is the second novel from Stuart after Booker prize-winner Shuggie Bain, which Euphoria and Everything Everywhere All At Once producer A24 is currently making into a series with the BBC. A broadcaster has yet to be set on Young Mungo.
The story follows Protestant Mungo and Catholic James who live in a hyper-masculine world. They are caught between two of Glasgow’s housing estates where young working-class men divide themselves along sectarian lines, and fight territorial battles for the sake of reputation. They should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all, and yet they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the doocot that James has built for his prize racing pigeons.
As they begin to fall in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, and Mungo must work hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold. But the threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable. When Mungo’s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a loch in Western Scotland, with two strange men behind whose drunken banter lie murky pasts, he needs to summon all his inner strength and courage to get back to a place of safety, a place where he and James might still have a future.
The book was named Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post, NPR, Time, The Guardian, Amazon, Apple BookPage, Reader’s Digest, and the Times Of London, among others.
Stuart himself was born and raised in Glasgow. After graduating from the Royal College of Art, he moved to New York, where he began a career in fashion design. Shuggie Bain, his first novel, won the Booker Prize and both Debut of the Year and Book of the Year at the British Book Awards. It was also shortlisted for the US National Book Award for Fiction. The author is the subject of BBC One’s Imagine film Love, Hope and Grit.
As we first revealed, A24’s nascent international slate also includes a TV version of Yomi Adegoke’s anticipated debut novel The List, which is being made with HBO Max and BBC.
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