Douglas Stewart

You could never stop picking it yourself.

Yeah, the novel is called The Lost Language of Cranes, and I actually came to it much later than 1986, but I chose this because of how it explores a father and son relationship.

Both the father and son are gay and yet cannot come out to one another.

It's set in New York in the 1980s, and it shows how close people can be while at the same time how they can withhold the truth from those they love most.

You know, Philip the son has come out to his family after he's fallen in love with another man,

And yet at the same time, unbeknownst to him, his father is visiting gay porn theatres and struggling with his own latent homosexuality.

You know, it's just I love that book.

I thought it was very powerful.

We tend when we are gay people are, you know, going through that ordeal of coming out to our families.

We think it's sort of all about us, and we imagine that our parents and our siblings are settled and sure of who they are.

And, you know, I love this book for saying, well, maybe that's not the truth about that.

It's very good on lavender marriages and also the different pain that is caused by coming out at a later age.

You know, I think it's always best if you can be here in a safe space, to be honest, as soon as you can, so that other people can know the very true version of yourself.

And I think, you know, we all have a very lonely experience no matter who we are and, you know, and where we are.

And part of being a writer is trying to connect humanity in that way and to sort of dispel the things that we cannot talk about.

And, you know, one of the things that was most wonderful about Shuggie Bain is when a reader comes to me and says, you know, I lived that very similar life and I've never been able to talk to anyone about it and it's affected me very profoundly.

I kept it even secret from the people I grew up around and

So that idea of islands within islands has been throughout all my work.

And to be really broad, you know, a housing scheme in the east end of Glasgow is an island because, you know, you can be feel very sort of contained and trapped by the socioeconomic forces.

Certainly a mining village and the village that Shuggie grows up in that I did in the central belt of Scotland.