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The Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart is a master of writing about tender souls in tough spaces. He is a tender soul himself, having grown up gay in working class Glasgow with an alcoholic mother (she  died when he was 16), an experience that informs both his debut novel, Shuggie Bain, which won the Booker Prize, and his 2022 follow-up, Young Mungo. In both books, Stuart has created indelible portraits of complicated mothers and their conflicted sons trying to navigate a hostile and soul-sapping world. “I’m always writing about loneliness and belonging and love,” he has said. “That’s what keeps me coming back to the page.” Loneliness and belonging and love might also be what draws Stuart to the defiant heroine of Alan Warner’s 1995 novel, Morvern Callar, and the tempestuous and violent world of 17th century soldiers in Cromwell’s New Model Army in Maria McCann’s As Meat Loves Salt, the two books he has chosen to talk about in this episode of Shelf Life.