Island

Alistair MacLeod has been hailed internationally as a master of the short story. Now MacLeod's collected stories, including two never before published, are gathered together for the first time in Island. These sixteen superbly crafted stories, most of them firmly based in Cape Breton even if its people stray elsewhere, depict men and women living out their lives against the haunting landscape that surrounds them. Focusing on the complexities and abiding mysteries at the heart of human relationships, MacLeod maps the close bonds and impassable chasms that lie between man and woman, parent and child, and invokes memory and myth to celebrate the continuity of the generations, even in the midst of unremitting change. Eloquent, humane, powerful, and told in a voice at once elegiac and life-affirming, the stories in this astonishing collection seize us from the outset and remain with us long after the final page.

Autorentext

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 In 2000, these two books, accompanied by previously unpublished stories, were brought together in a single-volume edition entitled Island: The Collected Stories.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.