John of John is a 2026 literary fiction novel by Booker Prize-winning author Douglas Stuart. Set in the late 1990s amid the wind-scoured isolation of the Isle of Lewis and Harris in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides, the book is a bleak, atmospheric, and powerful exploration of family secrets, religious suppression, and the burdens of masculinity.

Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home to the island of Harris to find that not much has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal resumes his old life, caught between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his Glaswegian grandmother Ella, who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for decades.

While Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As the seasons pass, everything is poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly entangled.