Island

Joyce Carol Oates gives us a precise image of the experience of reading these stories: "that sudden feeling of insecurity that comes to a traveler in unmapped country; a sense of immediacy, cinematic in its vividness."


The sixteen exquisitely crafted stories in Island prove Alistair MacLeod to be a master. Quietly, precisely, he has created a body of work that is among the greatest to appear in English in the last fifty years.

A book-besotted patriarch releases his only son from the obligations of the sea. A father provokes his young son to violence when he reluctantly sells the family horse. A passionate girl who grows up on a nearly deserted island turns into an ever-wistful woman when her one true love is felled by a logging accident. A dying young man listens to his grandmother play the old Gaelic songs on her ancient violin as they both fend off the inevitable. The events that propel MacLeod's stories convince us of the importance of tradition, the beauty of the landscape, and the necessity of memory.

ALISTAIR MACLEOD was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, and raised among an extended family in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. MacLeod's only novel, No Great Mischief, won numerous awards, including the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, and the Trillium Book Award. He was also the author of two internationally acclaimed collections of short stories: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun. In 2000, these two books, accompanied by previously unpublished stories, were brought together in a single-volume edition entitled Island: The Collected Stories. Alistair MacLeod died in April 2014.