Douglas Stuart Toronto launch "John of John"
About this Event
Featuring a reading by Douglas Stuart and conversation with Zak Jones.
Audience Q & A and book signing to follow conversation.
Doors open at 6:30pm and event begins at 7pm.
Seating is General Admission. Tickets are $15 and $20 general admission, and $48 book and ticket.
About the book:
From the Booker-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo comes a vivid, moving, and beautifully crafted novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a close-knit community and a fraying family, of a father’s expectations and a son’s desires.
Longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by GQ • The New York Times • The Guardian • Esquire • Chicago Review of Books • The Sydney Morning Herald • Time • Oprah Daily • Vogue • ELLE • Kirkus Reviews • Los Angeles Times • Literary Hub • Washington Post • Goodreads • Publishers Weekly • USA Today • Service95 • A Globe and Mail Spring 2026 Read
"To read John of John is to move to the Isle of Harris and take up residence in the family croft. The novel is so immersive, so all-encompassing, that I felt like I was living in it. Douglas Stuart has written something brilliant and rare." —Ann Patchett
Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for several decades. Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly knotted.
John of John is a singular novel about duty and patience and the transformative power of the truth. It is a magnificent literary work that shows Douglas Stuart working at an even higher level of artistic creation.
Douglas Stuart is a Scottish-American author. His New York Times-bestselling debut novel Shuggie Bain won the 2020 Booker Prize and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. It was the winner of two British Book Awards, including Book of the Year, and was a finalist for the National Book Award, PEN/Hemingway Award, National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, Kirkus Prize, as well as several other literary awards. Stuart’s writing has appeared in the New Yorker and Literary Hub.
Zak Jones is the author of (Hamish Hamilton, 2026). He is a writer and literary scholar. A dual Canadian-American citizen, he grew up between rural North Carolina and Toronto. His short story, “So Much More to Say,” won the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s 2023 Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers, and his story, “Love Handles,” won the 2023 Norma Epstein National Award. Jones is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto studying veterans’ narratives in American Literature, writing his second novel, and developing an archival documentary project, Riding Six White Horses.
Where is it happening?
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
CAD 19.50 to CAD 59.17
