I ranked and reviewed each of the shortlisted novels. I also paired each novel with a classic. The winner of the 2026 Booker Prize was announced at 9:45 PM GMT. It was livestreamed on The Booker Prizes YouTube Channel.

I wrote an essay about John of John in September, and I will let that stand as my review of this exceptional book. It appears below.

Here I will say that I decided to choose Douglas Stuart’s beautiful, individual expression of the gay experience over Marlon James’s polyphonic, exuberant and unquestionably more comprehensive expression of that experience.

I was ultimately more moved by Stuart’s quiet, atmospheric, almost impressionistic rendering of a gay youth suffocating in a place where he is not permitted to be honest about his attractions, his artistic passions, or his most deeply held beliefs. It is an almost perfect book, brought to life with remarkable restraint. I loved the theme-park ride The Disappearers set me on, but it was a bracingly swervey ride in which James sometimes momentarily lost control of his vessel.

My September essay is a comparative piece in its own unique way—it compares an agonizing experience of mine, one that is tied to deep personal regret, to that of John-Calum, Stuart’s protagonist. So I will not do here what I did with my review of The Things We Never Say and rewrite it to strengthen its comparison to Middlemarch. Instead, I will explain here why I think the books belong on the same psychic shelf.

John of John begins with Cal on the phone to his strong-willed, devout Presbyterian father. Cal’s grandmother is ill. His father, Big John, needs help with shepherding and weaving. He demands that Cal return. It is a wrenching choice for Cal because in the big city, he has found acceptance of his gay identity. He has been able to pursue his passion as a visual artist.

Rickie in The Longest Journey is like Cal in that both had very trying childhoods. Rickie too finds his way in college:

A year ago he had known none of these joys. He had crept cold and friendless and ignorant out of a great public school, preparing for a silent and solitary journey, and praying as a highest favour that he might be left alone. Cambridge had not answered his prayer. She had taken and soothed him, and warmed him, and had laughed at him a little, saying that he must not be so tragic yet awhile, for his boyhood had been but a dusty corridor that led to the spacious halls of youth. In one year he had made many friends and learnt much, and he might learn even more if he could but concentrate his attention on that cow. E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey

Now that he has joined his father on a perishingly small island, Cal is losing his direction. He no longer knows what he wants to do with the rest of his life.

Rickie feels that way as he prepares to move on from Cambridge. He has fallen in love with a young woman whose brother is nearly as controlling as Cal’s, Pembroke. In this scene, Pembroke addresses his aimlessness:

"I have seen so many promising, brilliant lives wrecked simply on account of this—not settling soon enough. My dear boy, you must think. Consult your tastes if possible—but think. You have not a moment to lose. The Bar, like your father?"
"Oh, I wouldn’t like that at all."
"I don’t mention the Church."
"Oh, Rickie, do be a clergyman!" said Miss Pembroke. "You’d be simply killing in a wide-awake."
He looked at his guests hopelessly. Their kindness and competence overwhelmed him. "I wish I could talk to them as I talk to myself," he thought. … Aloud he said, "I’ve sometimes wondered about writing."
"Writing?" said Mr. Pembroke, with the tone of one who gives everything its trial. "Well, what about writing? What kind of writing?"
"I rather like,"—he suppressed something in his throat,—"I rather like trying to write little stories."
"Why, I made sure it was poetry!" said Agnes. "You’re just the boy for poetry." ...
Mr. Pembroke’s teeth were clear of meringue, and he could refrain no longer. "My dear Rickie, your father and mother are dead, and you often say your aunt takes no interest in you. Therefore your life depends on yourself. Think it over carefully, but settle, and having once settled, stick. If you think that this writing is practicable, and that you could make your living by it—that you could, if needs be, support a wife—then by all means write. But you must work. Work and drudge. Begin at the bottom of the ladder and work upwards."
E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey

As Cal loses hope that he will escape the island, he throws himself into mind-numbing work.

Rickie gets a job working for Pembroke as a teacher, but he does not have a talent for it.

But here is a subject in which we must inevitably speak as one human being to another, not as one who has authority or the shadow of authority, and for this reason the elder school-master could suggest nothing but a few formulae. Formulae, like kindly traps, were not in Rickie’s line, so he abandoned these subjects altogether and confined himself to working hard at what was easy. In the house he did as Herbert did, and referred all doubtful subjects to him. In his form, oddly enough, he became a martinet. It is so much simpler to be severe. He grasped the school regulations, and insisted on prompt obedience to them. He adopted the doctrine of collective responsibility. When one boy was late, he punished the whole form. “I can’t help it,” he would say, as if he was a power of nature. As a teacher he was rather dull. He curbed his own enthusiasms, finding that they distracted his attention, and that while he throbbed to the music of Virgil the boys in the back row were getting unruly. E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey

Cal tries to connect to various romantic attachments. When he was younger, he hid his queerness behind a straight girlfriend.

Rickie’s marriage has become loveless, tormenting. He is far more affectionate toward his half-brother, Stephen Wonham.

Henceforward he deteriorates. Let those who censure him suggest what he should do. He has lost the work that he loved, his friends, and his child. He remained conscientious and decent, but the spiritual part of him proceeded towards ruin. E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey

At the end of the book, Cal’s older friend Innes finally makes a break for it. Has he escaped the island? Will Cal follow?

In the end, it is Stephen Wonham, who most resembles Innes. He stands up to Pembroke, who has been involved with Rickie’s writing.

“Listen to me, Pembroke. You’ve done people all your life—I think without knowing it, but that won’t comfort us. A wretched devil at your school once wrote to me, and he’d been done. Sham food, sham religion, sham straight talks—and when he broke down, you said it was the world in miniature.” He snatched at him roughly. “But I’ll show you the world.” He twisted him round like a baby, and through the open door they saw only the quiet valley, but in it a rivulet that would in time bring its waters to the sea. “Look even at that—and up behind where the Plain begins and you get on the solid chalk—think of us riding some night when you’re ordering your hot bottle—that’s the world, and there’s no miniature world. There’s one world, Pembroke, and you can’t tidy men out of it. They answer you back do you hear?—they answer back if you do them. If you tell a man this way that four sheep equal ten, he answers back you’re a liar.” E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey

The Mounting Cost of Staying in "John of John"

Everyone says it’s harder to leave. But it’s much harder to stay.

By Septimus Carr

In a book of heavily shared silences, of casual lies reflexively uttered in defense of festering secrets, the most extraordinary sequence in Douglas Stuart’s John of John is the bar scene between John-Calum and his almost-uncle Innes. The odd couple, each of whom suspects the other of closet homosexuality, poke furtively at the elaborate invisible walls between them, to explore the improbability that trust could unlock their respective internal prisons.

a h-aon / one

Sipping sambuca in a noisy mainland pub, the pair have made a fleeting escape from their boggy Scottish island, which remains in the late 1990s a barren sanctuary for a stagnant, best-forgotten past. Cal is a recent college graduate whose nascent luminosity has not yet been extinguished by his smothering surroundings. He is almost imperceptibly flirtatious with his father’s best friend Innes, a gentle farmer in his late forties who is compromised by entropic desperation despite eyes that still seem to Cal to be “lit from behind.” The two of them cagily probe which secrets can be sundered and which must be protected.

Innes asks Cal why he came home to the island after college. Cal’s answer is “I was scared.” He’d never been so alone, so responsible for himself. By way of explanation, Cal tells a story that assaults me from the page with a memory I hadn’t examined in years.

"I caught scabies in my second year. I came out in these itchy red sores and didn’t sleep for weeks. I finally plucked up the courage to tell my dad, to ask what it was and if I should go to hospital or not, and all my dad wanted to know was how I caught it." He chuckled sourly. "I caught it from someone in the library. Sad, right?" He took a draw and held the smoke inside before expelling it in a series of hoops. "I learnt I could never tell him about my actual life. I think that’s why I’m in so much debt. I just wish I had someone to phone, someone to ask."

Innes made a small murmur of understanding. "Everyone says it’s harder to leave. But it’s much harder to stay."

Innes’s aphorism is a striking diagnosis of their mutual affliction. It is the core of Stuart’s bitterly pleasurable novel, a hushed and irreverent ode to emotional paralysis that has mounted a formidable 2026 Booker Prize candidacy. Staying on the Isle of Harris is gradually killing both Cal and Innes, but it is also the most laborious of their binary options. Leaving brings agonizing finality, but if done correctly it is a single swing of the blade. You only have to do it once.

diagnosis / breithneachadh

The wait in my pediatrician’s office would be excruciating even without the gradually mounting itch. I am a twenty-year-old man, but I need to get a rash treated, and it’s been years since I saw a primary care physician. Already I have declined lollipops and been branded with superhero band-aids. I settle into a chair, and my knees rise to my shoulders. To get here, I’d had to tell my parents why. The itch is embarrassing enough. There’s no way I’ll tell them that I’ve already been told it is a mite infestation spread through close skin-to-skin contact. My girlfriend had caught it in a squalid dorm, and the shared discomfort, coupled with empathy for her intense aerophobia on the eve of a semester in London, foreclosed a decisive separation at the start of our junior year in college. This was the third consecutive fall that an “open relationship” seemed easier than a clean break.

“You have scabies,” the doctor tells me.

He tells me I should warn my girlfriend that she might be infected.

“She knows, and anyway she’s in London now.”

“But first, she left you with a going-away present,” he surmises. An awkward pause. “Well. Help yourself to a lolly at the desk.”

a dhà / two

The reason everyone says it’s harder to leave is that the longer you stay, the more impossible leaving seems. The islanders are bound by financial reality; most of Cal’s neighbors “paid their rents with little hope of ever owning their homes outright.” They are bound by traditions that limit educational opportunities and train them solely for the trades of the past: farming, shepherding, weaving with Industrial Revolution technology. Cal is the first in his family to go to college, and some islanders, like his childhood friend Doll, resent him for it.

"Doll . . . have I done something to annoy you?"
"You’ve done nothing. Nothing at all. You upped and left as it suited you. And then you show up expecting everything to be the same." He flicked the half-smoked cigarette into the sea. "So forgive us, college boy, if no one has the heart to throw a cèilidh."

Every character in John of John is chronically confronted with one question: How can they escape? Cal is ostensibly there to help his father, but is he even needed? “My father makes all kinds of excuses about why he wanted me home,” Cal tells Innes. “But let’s be honest, he can manage the croft by himself, he would rather manage by himself. He’s lonely, Innes. And he doesn’t know how to admit that.” Cal also returned to help his ailing grandmother, but she’s stealing from the church to fund his departure.

The money circulates through their little community like a mite infestation—each character professes a desire to leave, but when the cash comes round, each finds a nobler desire to pass opportunity on to his or her neighbor. Cal gives the money to his one-time “beard” Isla, who bears the illegitimate child everyone assumes is his. She accepts but in the end she can’t pull the trigger. Her grieving mother needs her on the island. Only Doll, the cause of the mother’s grief, finds a way to escape his stultifying existence:

"The [official report] said Doll had the liver of a much older man, that it was all burnt and black and fatty. But he said that in the end, it wasn’t the drink that killed him. He drowned."
"Isla, you can’t drown on dry land."...
"It can happen days after they swallow enough water. One woman drowned driving along the motorway, hours after being at the beach."
"But it was freezing. Why was he even in the sea?"
"Licky was saying maybe he wanted to drown himself. But honestly, I just think he was bored."

Doll’s tragic end grimly complicates Innes’s aphorism. Doll has been relieved of island drudgery, but did he leave or stay?

treatment / làimhseachadh

The treatment for scabies is a body wash meant to kill the mites in one immersive deployment. I am terrified that I will kill them only to be reinfected by a piece of clothing or my bedsheets. I hurl the bedding and every pair of jeans, every t-shirt, every sock, and all but one pair of underwear into the dormitory laundry machine and run upstairs to apply the prescription in the shower. But days go by, and the itch doesn’t stop. I lie awake every night trying not to scratch. In the bunk bed above me, my roommate is constantly scratching itches in his sleep. Letters from London arrive periodically. Affectionate, distant. Is she dating the guy she keeps talking about? It might be easier to meet new people if I knew what to say about her. It would be easier to meet new people if I didn’t have this constant itch. Several times I throw all my belongings into the laundry machine and run to the shower. The rash changes its appearance, transforming into dry blotches.

a trì / three

To leave might seem harder, but to stay is exhausting. Stuart’s islanders spend many pages looking for something to do to puncture the boredom. Doll self-medicates with liquor, and the strategy has increasing allure for Cal. The townspeople begin to lecture Cal about his drinking habit. He responds by taking ecstasy at a cèilidh (party) dominated by young people seeking to exhaust their sexual curiosity.

In John of John, sex is seldom a shared communicative bond. More often, it is two individuals quenching loneliness by downing bottles of sand. Cal and Doll have been pursuing momentary escape through sex for years.

It seemed to Cal that [Doll] felt better about the wickedness of it all if he pretended he was doing Cal some favour. If he pretended that they were only here because of the dirty things Cal wanted and that he was a big man, a good friend, to grant it to him even though at the end of it all, Cal was the one denied the pleasure of release. He was just a collection of replacement parts. A substitution for what Doll could not get. And so there was no way to begin with kisses, or with caresses, or with tender words. No way to be seen to be enjoying their bodies.

College-bound Isla’s future prospects dim with her pregnancy, a passionate concession to a mainland cad rationalized as one last fling before marrying a boring islander. Perhaps Cal’s healthiest hedges against loneliness are the “M4M” classified ads he takes out in city papers. He receives a friendly and sexy letter but spoils the opportunity by seeming too sexually desperate. “Cal,” reads the second letter, “I don’t think you’re what I am looking for. Wishing you all the best and that, Billy.”

If Cal’s coping mechanism is sex, John’s is faith. “I didn’t leave him, I left home,” Cal tells Innes in the bar. “And he left me first. He looked at me and he looked at Jesus and he chose Jesus.” Presbyterianism is the most effective barbed wire fence the island has at its disposal. Its rigid moralism is the iron fist that keeps the island in lockstep compliance. John’s highest self-concept is steeped in his austere piety as an elder in the church. But his fevered prayers rationalize his brutal abuse of Cal and mask the book’s most intensely guarded secret, a midpoint revelation that changes everything while changing nothing.

Many of the islanders, including Cal and John, are shepherds, but rather than lying down in green pastures or leading their flock beside still waters, these shepherds administer brutal castrations and decapitate newborn lambs with poor survival odds. “Thy rod and thy staff” cease to be an instrument of comfort. The Jesus who halted a stoning has left the island. In his place is a Presbyterian minister who shrugs off Isla and her unborn child as “two souls destined for damnation” even as he seeks to marry her off to Cal.

coping / a’ fulang

The open relationship never seems to convert to actual dating. On our first Christmas break from college, my girlfriend and I bonded one night over our respective flirtations with college peers, but morning brought jealous recriminations and regrets. Sophomore year, she began to crave the security of her Presbyterian upbringing, a lonely sentiment at her famously liberal liberal arts college but a constant imposition at my evangelical institution. She missed the consolation of religion; I was drowning in it. Soon, she was making campus visits at my school. But the conservative character of the school was increasingly an alienating burden to me. Like our relationship, it was a strained coupling that I lacked the courage to leave. Her mother seemed to sense this, pulling me aside during a family college visit to find out how I really felt. “We just want the best for both of you,” she said. Eventually we came to our collective senses: there would be no transfer. But as my junior year progresses, I find myself watching opportunities for new relationships on campus passing by with accelerating frequency. After a series of intense connections in overnight conversations, none of which materialize into anything lasting, my resolve strengthens. Christmas is coming, and leaving finally feels inevitable. The only question is whether there is anything real left to leave.

a ceithir / four

The care with which Stuart creates the setting of John of John is impressive, but he does not rely on painterly evocation of landscape to bring the Isle of Harris to life. Instead, location is vividly rendered through the culture of its inhabitants, through peat-fueled stasis alleviated by flashes of modernity. A copy of the opening volume of Marcel Proust—ironically belonging to John rather than Cal—slips from a vibrating dashboard. An abortive sex scene is scored to a hushed Nick Drake sunset. A cèilidh pulsates in full-on Chumbawamba desperation. This thorough sense of place reminded me of Colm Tóibín’s evocation of enervating small-town myopia in Long Island. That novel devoted a similar degree of care to its peripheral characters as it dramatized a partially severed relationship caught halfway between leaving and staying. But if I’ve ever read a novel that more beautifully straddled that pained dichotomy than John of John, I don’t know what it is.

Like Joni Mitchell, Cal has got the urge for going, but his must be suppressed. The funds Cal’s grandmother appropriated from the collection plate are long gone by winter and the chill invades his once buoyant spirit. “His father put all his faith in the Presbyterian penicillin,” Stuart’s narrator explains. “For whatever ailed you there was only one cure: work and prayer.” Cal obediently works himself into mindless submission. Now it is clear why Stuart began the book with an epigraph from George Eliot’s Silas Marner, who was a weaver, just like John and Cal: “Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.” The work merely roots the pain and leaves nothing planted for spring. The longer he stays, the more John-Calum morphs inexorably into John.

The book opens with a painful staying, as Cal ponders exile from urban acceptance. It closes with Innes’s sudden cleaving blow, a joyous defiance of John’s suffocating grip. Just as Cal was beginning to surrender to a Doll-like trajectory, Innes, who diagnosed the problem tersely with his aphorism in the portside bar, proves that it is never too late to leave and that staying is still the harder option. Cal finds a phone number for his first destination and ratifies his choice in a message dictated to a clerk: you have become the hope of us all.

cure / leigheas

Back home, I meet my girlfriend for a dread-inducing exchange of Christmas presents and semester stories. My firm extraction comes as a quietly expected surprise to her and a long-resisted scratch to me. The itch itself is left behind, too, in a Homeric return to the pediatrician. He scoldingly reveals that the rash is worse only because I’ve so often reapplied the body wash. The second time I used it, I was treating an infestation that was no longer present. The only reason I continued to itch was that my repeated attacks on my healthy skin conjured agonizing eczema.

Years later, after college, I will reunite with this girlfriend. And break up. And reunite and break up. Until we are in our thirties and the final break is far more painful than it ever should have been.

The treatment only works if you do it once.