Reader's guide for "John of John" by Douglas Stuart

CBS Mornings Reader's guide for "John of John" by Douglas Stuart, Oprah's book club pick .chip { background-image: url('/fly/bundles/cbsnewscore/images/chip-bgd/chip-bgd-cbs-mornings.jpg'); } May 5, 2026 / 8:43 AM EDT / CBS News Add CBS News on Google Oprah Winfrey named her newest book club pick: Douglas Stuart's "John of John." Here are questions to guide you as you read the novel. Reader's Guide Questions by Paula Cooper John of John begins in a solitary red phone box in Edinburgh as Cal Mcleod is summoned home after four years in art school by his strict Calvinist father, John.While Cal's postgraduation life in Edinburgh sounds bleak, returning to his sternly pious father after a taste of modernity and freedom is less enticing still. Did you question his decision to return home to Harris? Would you, in a similar situation, have stayed in Edinburgh?The Isle of Harris presents a hypnotic but severe backdrop of hard stone, dark skies, scabbed hillsides, and black tar roads that impact the mood of nearly every scene. Yet, as traditional Scottish home weavers, John and Cal see the world in vividly distinct color. How did John and Cal's shared—and deeply sensitive—reckoning of color stack up against an otherwise cold, difficult relationship? Doll's self-assessment is brutal. Speaking of the girls he knows from the island, he says, "They look at me like I'm a life sentence." Being the only Macdonald son, he is the darling of his mother's eye but is sentenced to life at the croft, and on the boat. Being tied to land you will never own and will die poor trying to keep seems a heavy burden to bear in an emptying village. Can you think of a comparable familial or professional scenario now, thirty years on in the United States? Throughout the story, the characters' relationships are partly defined by the use of Gaelic vs. English. This usage can indicate intimacy, remove, respect, exclusion, or ownership, and Gaelic cloaks the cruelty of the scrip...