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Jan 1, 1935 — Jan 1, 2014· 79 yrs

CANADA AUTHOR · FICTION · SCOTS

Alistair MacLeod

Also known as: Alistair Macleod, ALISTAIR MACLEOD

5
BOOKS
4.8
AVG RATING (4)
5
READERS

Alistair MacLeod (July 20, 1936 – April 20, 2014) was a Canadian novelist, short story writer and academic. His powerful and moving stories vividly evoke the beauty of Cape Breton Island's rugged landscape and the resilient character of many of its inhabitants, the descendants of Scottish immigrants, who are haunted by ancestral memories and who struggle to reconcile the past and the present. MacLeod has been praised for his verbal precision, his lyric intensity and his use of simple, direct language that seems rooted in an oral tradition. Although he is known as a master of the short story, MacLeod's 1999 novel No Great Mischief was voted Atlantic Canada's greatest book of all time. The novel also won several literary prizes including the 2001 International Dublin Literary Award.

North Battleford, Canada
Wikipedia

"ATTENTION," A VOICE BEGAN TO CALL, AND IT WAS AS THOUGH an oboe had suddenly become articulate.

— from Island

Most acclaimed

#1

No great mischief

4.0 (1)

Historical novel/family saga. The narrator Alexander MacDonald guides us through his family's mythic past as he recollects the heroic stories of his people: loggers, miners, drinkers, adventurers; men forever in exile, forever linked to their clan. There is the legendary patriarch who left the Scottish Highlands in 1779 and resettled in "the land of trees," where his descendants became a separate Nova Scotia clan. There is the team of brothers and cousins, expert miners in demand around the world for their dangerous skills. And there is Alexander and his twin sister, who have left Cape Breton and prospered, yet are haunted by the past. Elegiac, hypnotic, by turns joyful and sad, No Great Mischief is a spellbinding story of family, loyalty, and of the blood ties that bind us to the land from which our ancestors came.

#2

Island

5.0 (2)

In Island, his last novel, Huxley transports us to a Pacific island where, for 120 years, an ideal society has flourished. Inevitably, this island of bliss attracts the envy and enmity of the surrounding world. A conspiracy is underway to take over Pala and events begin to move when an agent of the conspirators, a newspaperman named Faranby, is shipwrecked there. What Faranby doesn't expect is how his time with the people of Pala will revolutionize all his values and -- to his amazement -- give him hope.

#3

The lost salt gift of blood

1989

5.0 (1)

This collection of 11 stories, set for the most part in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, uses detailed description of the stark, beautiful landscape and the lives of fishermen, farmers, miners, and lighthouse keepers to convey a powerful range of feelings. A Canadian writer not well known in the United States, MacLeod draws on childhood memories and on folktales of Ireland and Scotland, often writing in the first person and using Gaelic quotations to enhance the melancholy moods. A special blending of myth and reality here preserves impressions from a time and place that will never exist again.

Books

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