Autumn 2026 – Charlie – John of John

Before he became a celebrated Scottish author, Douglas Stuart (D.S.) kept the pot boiling by working as a fashion designer. His first novel, Shuggie Bain, published in 2020, won that year’s Booker Prize. His second book, Young Mungo, was published a mere two years later. His third and most recent work, John of John, was published this year and was shortlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize.

In “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Ursula K. Le Guin writes that she “would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”

Before you are three bags.

They’ve been given their own separate table inside the store your friend dragged you to on his mission to find you the perfect “starter bag.” You’ve had bags before, obviously, but these were always the practical kind, useful necessities for school you didn’t spare a second thought for. Now, helped along by your friend’s insistent enthusiasm, you’ve begun exploring what the world of bags has to offer. He decided that the perfect starting point would be the bags made by the designer D.S., though he refused to surrender any information about these bags or their creator. Purchasing one’s first bag is, apparently, a “personal experience” you need to “follow your own gut” for.

“It’s nice that they’ve decided to arrange them chronologically,” your friend remarks at your side. Shooting you a quick glance to confirm he has your full attention, he points to the bag on the left. “This one is the very first he made, the one in the middle came two years after, and the one on the right hit the stores this year.”

“And that,” he continues as he turns to face you, poking you firmly in the centre of your chest, “is all you’re getting out of me. I’ll be wandering around the store sighing longingly at beauties I can’t afford while you acquaint yourself with these three.” Spinning around once more, he glides off to do exactly that.

Trying to feel exasperated but ending up primarily with fondness, you decide to focus on the task at hand. Looking at the bags side by side, it’s immediately clear, even to your inexperienced eyes, that the same designer made all three. The two on the left, while not the same colour, are identical in shape. You’re sure there’s a wrong and right terminology when it comes to bags, but you can only describe them as large, sack-like purses. They both have a zipper at the top and a singular strap that looks just long enough for the bag to be either carried in hand or settled over your shoulder, which makes you give them a mental point for ease of use.

The first bag is grey, though not just one shade of it. You can imagine that D.S. asked his fabric department (although, would he have been famous enough with his first bag to have a whole department? Or did he go on a scavenger hunt looking for the perfect material?) for something as close to swirling smoke as you can get with cloth. There’s no clear pattern to the fabric and the different shades of grey flow into each other seamlessly. If it were fashionable to sell bags pre-scented, this one would have been spritzed with woodsmoke and cigarettes.

The second purse, the one in the middle, is coloured like it got into a fistfight with a puddle and lost. Muted blue, like someone layered a faintly transparent image of stormy clouds over a colour swatch named “wistful memories.” It also has some patches of purplish blue that look halfway between a stain and a bruise.

The third bag is unlike the other two in both shape and colour, though you notice all three are of a similar size: large enough to carry your own belongings, alongside those of your friends, during a night out.

This bag doesn’t have a zip to close it fully, though it does have a large magnetic clasp to grant your belongings the illusion of privacy. It’s made of a stiffer fabric that has allowed its bottom edges to be fashioned into crisp points. Its colours are as muted and muddled as the other two, blending from swampish greens into watered down ashy oranges.

You’re surprised to find yourself thinking that their shapes seem quite boring. You wouldn’t be able to call them anything other than bags. Which isn’t a problem, especially for a rookie like you. It’s just that you imagined a sophisticated and established designer to experiment more with form, especially with the third one. By the time he was creating that one, he would have been quite famous already, so it’s strange that he hasn’t decided to make something more groundbreaking than the first two.

But you can appreciate someone sticking to what they know and love.

You argue with yourself. Maybe this is just your inexperience talking. Maybe you’ll find they’re actually quite dissimilar upon a closer look.

You don’t know exactly what goes into inspecting a bag for its quality. You probably should have asked your friend what he looks for when he goes shopping, but he isn’t the type to give straightforward answers. Darting a glance his way, you can imagine what he would say if you were to ask right now: “You can trust that they’re good quality; I wouldn’t point you in the wrong direction with something you know nothing about, but you have to discover for yourself what you need from a bag! I don’t want you to just copy my style for the rest of your bag-loving life.”

Alright. But it would be so much easier to use his opinions as a starting point.

You go to pick up the grey bag to look at the stitching and get a sense of how the fabric feels in your hands. Wrapping your hand around the straps and lifting, you’re surprised to find the bag is not only heavier than you expected it to be, but that it’s heavy because it’s filled with stuff. Easing the zipper open, you can see a battered sketch pad, miniature black cab, what seems to be an old housephone torn off the wall, and a pocket Bible.

Perplexed, you reach for the zipper of the second bag and open it up. This one also has a small Bible and art supplies, alongside an explosion of fishing tackle that has found its way into every corner of the bag, and even some pigeon feathers.

The third bag is also filled with junk. Nothing for sketching this time, and the Bible has doubled in size. There are bits of fluff stuck between some of its pages, peeking out beyond the confines of the cover. Pulling a clump away reveals it to be unwashed sheepswool. Releasing it to float back into the bag, you spot a small square of pink knitted fabric stained with what looks like make-up, strangely similar in colour to the purple splotches on the second bag.

After staring, dumbfounded, at all their contents for a few seconds, you whirl around to look for your friend. When your gaze locks onto his, he speaks before you get the chance to open your mouth.

“They’re supposed to be like that.”

He doesn’t even attempt to hide the size of his smirk. It’s like he was waiting for this exact moment.

You barely manage to keep “what the fuck” behind your teeth, though you feel it would be a perfectly reasonable reaction to both him and the bags.

“The items inside of the purses, they’re supposed to be there. Every bag in here is the same. It’s part of what you buy. You wouldn’t have found them without the contents in any other store either.”

He’s vibrating with joy as he says it, the prick.

You don’t know how to respond to such absurdity, but he must take pity on how long your mouth has been hanging open, because he continues without prompting: “You don’t have to appreciate any of the things you find in those bags, but you can’t purchase any of them without their contents. You can decide to dump everything out into the trash as soon as you get home and forget about it. That’s up to you.” He gestures in your direction while saying it.

“However,” he pokes his index finger towards you in what is slowly becoming his signature move of the day, “it will have to come with you on the journey home first, meaning that it will be your stuff, at least for a little while. And who knows, it might stick with you forever. This’ll be your first bag, after all.”

When you move to sputter out a response, he cuts you off. “Back to shopping now.” He starts to make shooing motions. “I’m still not helping you!”

No less astonished than you were five minutes ago, you slowly turn back towards the bags, looking at them without noticing anything for a few seconds. Taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, you peek inside all three again. They all have a small pocket on the inside, the kind where you can slide your phone or something else you don’t want to lose in the dark inside of their bellies.

Every pocket has the same flyer sticking out of it, though it’s folded in half on the third purse. It’s an Alcoholics Anonymous leaflet.

Letting your hands glide over the rich fabric of each bag, you notice how neat and precise the sewing is on each of them. When you look at the sleeve of the sweater you’re wearing, you can see that each stitch is about half a centimeter long, and there’s a thread hanging loose even though you bought it just a few weeks ago. The individual stitches of each bag are almost impossible to see with the naked eye, perfectly spaced and always equal in distance from the edges. D.S. must have spent an eternity on the details.

The first two bags are similar in their stitching. The colours of their threads match perfectly with the fabrics of the bags themselves, grey for the grey bag, and blue and purple for the other. When you move the bags a bit, the stitches gleam faintly in the light, like each thread has exactly one strand made from a glittery material.

The sewing of the third bag is largely the same, though instead of a glittery strand, this one is charcoal grey.

Though you can appreciate the amount of dedication that went into the meticulous stitching, you’re slightly disappointed once more that D.S. didn’t decide to go for something more experimental. What he’s done here is stunning, without a doubt, but in this, too, the third one could stand to be more distinguishable from the other two. You’re not sure what kinds of different stitching exist, but this seems like the most straightforward technique he could have chosen out of all of them.

Even so, you can appreciate that he decided to step out of his comfort zone even this much. And you have to admit, though the third bag is still similar to the other two, D.S. clearly made an effort to do things a bit differently.

Mind made up, you take the third bag to the cash register.

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