We are never told why the Glasgow lad of “Found Wanting” settles for the solicitor, who carries him off to Edinburgh, instead of writing back to the lonely crofter’s son. In each story, it’s too confronting, or not yet possible, for the protagonists to choose lovers their own age, the boys they really desire. The protagonist of “Found Wanting,” Stuart’s 2020 short story, has placed a lonely-hearts ad: “M - 17, Discreet, Not Out.” Our correspondent is “Shy” and “Looking for same” “likes” include “Michelle Pfeiffer, Thomas Hardy.” Another story, “The Englishman” (also published in The New Yorker), likewise follows a young gay man from working-class Scotland in the 1980s. In this regard, it’s more reminiscent of the author’s earliest published work. But where “Shuggie Bain ” centered on the devotion of a son to his radiant, self-destructive mother, “Young Mungo” is about another strain: first love across sectarian lines. Like “Shuggie Bain,” Stuart’s 2020 Booker Prize-winning first novel, “Young Mungo” has a lived-in understanding of the textures of life with an alcoholic parent, and mothers with misplaced conviction in the masculinizing effects of fishing trips. When 15-year-old Mungo and his brother Hamish speed through central Glasgow in a car the latter has been paid to steal, the neighborhoods are new to Mungo he has barely traveled beyond the confines of a few narrow streets.

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