John of John seems at first to be cut from familiar cloth, a stock fable in which a young man returns to his stifling birthplace after a spell under wider skies and attempts some sort of reckoning with the person or persons responsible for his pain. The novel opens during an unspecified summer in the 1990s – before iPods, Grindr, the expansion of air travel and, crucially, the relaxation of Sunday trading restrictions in the Outer Hebrides. John-Calum Macleod, mostly known as Cal, is summoned back from Edinburgh to the Isle of Harris by his father, John. His grandmother Ella’s legs are getting bad; she’s been seen talking to the sheep. Cal is to leave the fleshpots behind and come home. ‘It’s time,’ he is informed (conversations in Gaelic are italicised). ‘You’ve had your fun.’

Over a long and tortuous journey, which it is clear Cal is in no hurry to complete, Douglas Stuart puts some flesh on the story’s bones. Cal is broke and depressed. Four years at art school have left him with a pile of debt but no clear sense of purpose. His love life has been energetic but joyless and laden with guilt. On the ferry he pops his last E and washes it down with cider.

Cal’s father is a tenant farmer and weaver, and a precentor of the local Free Presbyterian church. He is also a walking hand grenade of anger, repression and anxiety. His relationship with a neighbour, Innes of Innes (‘known as Innes Ciùin, Gentle Innes, to distinguish from his father, Innes Crùbaidh,