No Great Mischief
Alistair MacLeod
  • Published: 4 May 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099283928
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $29.99

No Great Mischief

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Winner of the International Impac Dublin Literary Award

'A brilliant and haunting novel'
Daily Mail

In 1779, driven out of his home, Calum MacDonald sets sail from the Scottish Highlands with his extensive family. After a long, terrible journey he settles his family in 'the land of trees', and eventually they become a separate Nova Scotian clan: red-haired and black-eyed, with its own identity, its own history.

It is the 1980s by the time our narrator, Alexander MacDonald, tells the story of his family, a thrilling and passionate story that intersects with history: with Culloden, where the clans died, and with the 1759 battle at Quebec that was won when General Wolfe sent in the fierce Highlanders because it was 'no great mischief if they fall'.
  • Published: 4 May 2001
  • ISBN: 9780099283928
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 272
  • RRP: $29.99
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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.

portrait photo of Alistair MacLeod

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Praise for No Great Mischief

This year No Great Mischief made Alistair MacLeod's position as a master of prose even more firmly assured. This is a work of true lyricism, emotional intelligence and breathtakingly acute observation

Observer

A lesson in the art of storytelling

Times Literary Supplement

Close to being a masterpiece, this intensely poignant 1999 novel stays in the mind for days...Quite simply, a wonderful, wonderful book

Val Hennessey, Daily Mail

Hauntingly elegiac novel

Simon Shaw, Daily Mail

You will find scenes from this majestic novel burned into your mind forever

Alice Munro

One of the great undiscovered writers of our time

Michael Ondaatje

The novel is close to being a masterpiece. The characters, the light and the weather, the story itself - its beautiful tone and shape, its harsh and melancholy music - stay with you for days afterwards. The novel is simply breathtaking in its emotional range

Colm Toibin, Irish Times

Exceptional... The book is pervaded by the humour and colour; intensely vivid, and very, very moving

Independent

Alistair MacLeod is a wonderfully talented writer

Margaret Atwood