> Skip to content
  • Published: 31 July 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446484876
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 448

Island




The collected stories by one of the greatest short-story writers in the world.

These slow, beautiful stories - resolute and resonant - are small masterpieces: apparently simple but actually crafted with enormous skill and precision. Set against the unforgiving landscape of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, they are all concerned with the complexities and mysteries of the human heart, the unbreakable bonds and unbridgeable chasms between man and woman, parent and child.

Steeped in memory and myth and washed in the brine and blood of the long battle with the land and the sea, these stories celebrate a passionate engagement with the natural world and a continuity of the generations in the face of transition, in the face of love and loss.

As John McGahern says in his eloquent foreword: 'the work has a largeness, of feeling, of intellect, of vision, a great openness and generosity, even an old-fashioned courtliness. The stories stand securely outside of fashion while reflecting deep change'. Bringing together all Alistair MacLeod's short fiction, and including two previously uncollected stories, Island represents the great achievement of one of the world's finest storytellers.

  • Published: 31 July 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446484876
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 448

About the author

Alistair MacLeod

Alistair MacLeod was born in 1936 and raised in Cape Breton, Nove Scotia. MacLeod is the author of two short story collections, The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories (1986) and the novel, No Great Mischief, published in 1999. Written over the course of thirteen years, No Great Mischief won numerous Canadian literary awards and the 2001 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. All of his published short stories, plus one new piece, were collected in Island, published in 2000. Alistair MacLeod died in 2014.

Also by Alistair MacLeod

See all

Praise for Island

A lifetime's achievement in more than one sense

Sunday Times

Beautifully crafted stories: elegiac, honest, proud, and both eloquent and taciturn, like their subjects...a wonderfully talented writer

Margaret Atwood

Provokingly singular and rare, an island of richness

Guardian

Rarely does a great writer offer himself to us with an oeuvre so complete

New York Times Book Review

Startling in their simple perfection

Sunday Tribune