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ISBN 9780771098826 (0-7710-9882-0, 0771098820)

As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories

by Alistair MacLeod

ISBN 0771098820 (0-7710-9882-0)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:

The superbly crafted stories collected in Alistair MacLeod's As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories depict men and women acting out their "own peculiar mortality" against the haunting landscape of Cape Breton Island. In a voice at once elegiac and life-affirming, MacLeod describes a vital present inhabited by the unquiet spirits of a Highland past, invoking memory and myth to celebrate the continuity of the generations even in the midst of unremitting change.

His second collection, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories confirms MacLeod's international reputation as a storyteller of rare talent and inspiration.

From the Trade Paperback edition. [via]

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ISBN 9780771034893 (0-7710-3489-X, 077103489X)

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Barometer Rising

by Alistair MacLeod

ISBN 077103489X (0-7710-3489-X)
Softcover, McClelland & Stewart Ltd

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Barometer Rising is Hugh MacLennan's enormously ambitious first novel, a closely plotted and compulsively readable book that combines its author's love for nationalist melodrama with the grisly realism of a folk disaster-ballad. Published in 1941, as the Second World War was ripening into its full horror, Barometer Rising looks back to the Halifax of the last year of the First World War, and to one of the worst accidents in Canadian history: the explosion of the munitions ship Mont Blanc, responsible for 1,600 deaths, 9,000 injuries, and the annihilation of much of the city.

The story that MacLennan drapes over this catastrophe is the kind of suspenseful romance that would have made a fantastic Bogart and Bacall vehicle. Penelope Wain, a privileged woman in her late 20s, has found war work as a designer in her father's shipyards. Her male colleagues resent her presence but can't deny her superlative skill. A tough, independent, appealing woman, she still cherishes the memory of her former lover--her cousin Neil Macrae, who was disgraced in the war overseas and reportedly killed. Neil, however, did not die after all, and he has returned to Halifax to find Penelope and clear his name. The explosion of the Mont Blanc, which irrevocably alters the characters' lives, soon interrupts this potboiler of a plot.

MacLennan is a rather heavy-handed writer, fond of epic description and stylized, sentimentalized characters, but Barometer Rising holds together remarkably well. A much more entertaining book than Two Solitudes, it still has much of the intellectual thrust of MacLennan's later work and was one of the finest Canadian novels to appear in the 1940s. --Jack Illingworth [via]

More editions of Barometer Rising:

Barometer Rising: ISBN 077103489X (0-7710-3489-X)
Softcover, McClelland & Stewart Ltd

Island : The Collected Stories

by Alistair MacLeod

ISBN 0099422328 (0-09-942232-8)
Softcover, Random House

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ISBN 9780375713040 (0-375-71304-2, 0375713042)

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Island: The Collected Stories of Alistair MacLeod

by Alistair MacLeod

ISBN 0375713042 (0-375-71304-2)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:

Island collects into a single volume the superbly crafted stories of Alistair MacLeod. In addition to their original appearances in North America's finest literary journals (and various reprints in Best American Stories and other prestigious anthologies), all but two of the attentive, meditative stories filled the previous books The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986). These two books were enough to gain MacLeod the admiration of readers in numerous languages and writers as diverse as Michael Ondaatje, Joyce Carol Oates, and Colm T�ib�n.

With unseen, magician's fingers, MacLeod makes the craggy rocks and wave-slapped bays of rugged Cape Breton Island speak for themselves. As in "The Boat," in which the very walls of a house and the fixtures of a boat find voice and carry the story, the stories in Island sing in a choir of voices not exclusively human. Dogs, the lamps of isolated lighthouses, winding roads, and slabs of winter ice sing together in voices both regional and universal. The sternness of the landscape and the livelihoods of MacLeod's people inflect both the actions of his characters and the voice of their narration. In the tragic "As Birds Bring Forth the Sun," a "man with a Highland name who lived beside the sea" nurses an injured dog despite the protests of "the more practical members of his family, who had seen run-over dogs before, [who] suggested that her neck be broken by his strong hands or that he grasp her by the hind legs and swing her head against a rock." These are timeless, ageless stories not only because they will last alongside the similarly dense and striking stories of Chekhov or Carver, but also because in reading them we are ageless, simultaneously child, young lover, and aged hand. --Darryl Whetter [via]

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ISBN 9780771098864 (0-7710-9886-3, 0771098863)

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Lives of Short Duration

by David Adams Richards, Alistair MacLeod

ISBN 0771098863 (0-7710-9886-3)
Softcover, McClelland & Stewart

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Book summary:

While David Adams Richards is best known for his more recent award-winning novels Nights Below Station Street, Evening Snow Will Bring Such Peace, and Mercy Among the Children, his first forays into literary fiction are still among his most powerful. His third novel, Lives of Short Duration, is an early excavation of fictional communities in the Miramichi region of New Brunswick, to which Richards has returned in his fiction again and again. The story spans 100 years in the Terri family's erractic history as entrepreneurs and would-be social leaders, moving backwards and forwards in time, tracing changing family fortunes, social mores, and the strained relationships between the dominant English and French communities and the region's Aboriginal people. Richards guides us into a world defined by alcoholism, self-destructive violence, and the frenetic impulse to succeed at whatever cost, mixing regional folklore and snippets of traditional wisdom with a remarkable ear for the voices of the men and women who call the Miramichi home. It's a potent and powerful novel that foreshadows the stunning fictions that were yet to come from one of Canada's finest writers. --Jeffrey Canton [via]

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Lives of Short Duration: ISBN 0771098863 (0-7710-9886-3)
Softcover, McClelland & Stewart

ISBN 9780006545385 (0-00-654538-6, 0006545386)

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The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

by Alistair MacLeod

ISBN 0006545386 (0-00-654538-6)
Softcover, HarperCollins Publishers Limited

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Book summary:

Alistair MacLeod's short stories know everything about your heart. Each of the stories in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood will enter your chest to beat alongside that startled red engine of your life: sometimes as a healing doctor, sometimes as a terrifying predator. All of the stories are set on the ruggedly beautiful island of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, a place where heart and home are often in conflict. Nurtured by a landscape rich in serenity and wisdom but poor in economic opportunity, MacLeod's characters are at once unique to that mountainous isle and universal in their reluctant migrations. In "The Boat," for example--surely one of the finest stories in the language--an only son watches his numerous sisters, "the daughters of the room and of the house," work and eventually abandon the house in which they were born for educations and romances in distant cities. Torn between the schoolbooks his mother pointedly disparages and his father's ailing health, the son denies his father's own wishes and quits school to "remain with him as long as he lives and ... fish the seas together." The father's calm protests end with the chilling warning, "I hope you will remember what you have said."

This time depicting the arduous, life-threatening occupation of mining rather than fishing, "The Vastness of the Dark" similarly combines tenderness and tragedy across a generational divide. Each story is pitch-perfect, with an evolving, patient tone that unfailingly offers the right phrase or observation at the right time. Contested only by Alice Munro as the finest Canadian short story writer, Alistair MacLeod offers the rare combination of a craft so polished it is transparent and an emotional intelligence that is both hard-fought and -won and quietly detached. --Darryl Whetter [via]

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No Great Mischief

by Alistair MacLeod

ISBN 0224067214 (0-224-06721-4)
Softcover, Random House

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For the MacDonalds, the past is not a foreign country. This Cape Breton clan may have lived in the New World since 1779, when Calum Ruadh ("the red Calum") and his wife, 12 children, and dog landed. Scotland, however, remains their true home. So profound is their connection to their lost land that on brief visits they find themselves welcomed by strangers. When one descendent tells a Scotswoman that she's from Canada, she is offered a gentle rejoinder: "That may be.... But you are really from here. You have just been away for a while." In some ways this is unsurprising, since the MacDonalds either have deep black hair or their ancestor's coloring. And those with the latter have "eyes that were so dark as to be beyond brown and almost in the region of glowing black. Such individuals would manifest themselves as strikingly unfamiliar to some, and as eerily familiar to others." Another sport of nature? Many are fraternal twins, including Alistair MacLeod's narrator, Alexander, and his sister.

But No Great Mischief is far more than the straightforward saga of one family over the generations. Instead the author has created a painfully beautiful myth in which the long-ago is in many ways more present than modern existence. Even in the last decades of the 20th century, the MacDonalds fall into Gaelic--its inflections, rhythms, and song--with deep nostalgia. This is a family that is used to composing itself in the face of disaster. They often assure one another, "My hope is constant in thee," and in the light of their many losses, the clan must cling to its motto.

No Great Mischief begins with Alexander's visit to Toronto, where his eldest brother now subsists on a diet of drink and memories. The narrator, a successful orthodontist, doesn't have much to do with the former but is unable (or unwilling) to escape the latter. As the novel proceeds, Alexander fills in his family history, including such key episodes as his great-great-grandfather's self-exile from Scotland. Though Calum Ruadh had intended to leave his dog behind, it broke away and tried to catch up with him. MacLeod piercingly captures the animal's struggle as her master first tries to make her head for shore and then--realizing she won't desert him--spurs her on. Throughout No Great Mischief various people recall this incident, an emblem of intensity, hope, and dependence. A descendant of the bitch is also on hand when Alexander's parents and one of his brothers disappear under the ice on a cold spring night. She persists in searching for her people and tries to protect their lighthouse from the new keeper, receiving in return "four bullets into her loyal waiting heart." When Alexander's grandfather hears of her death, he uses a phrase that becomes one of the book's litanies, "It was in those dogs to care too much and to try too hard."

This is a MacDonald characteristic as well. A good deal of No Great Mischief's strength stems from scenes of longing and despair--for those who die for a lost cause, whether in 1692 when one leader is killed ("the redness of his hair dyed forever brighter by the crimson of his blood") or in an Ontario uranium mine where one brother is decapitated. MacLeod evokes his clan, and the elemental beauty of their landscape, in quiet, precise language that gains power with each repetition. (A sentence such as "All of us are better when we're loved" comes to acquire a near proverbial ring.) If he occasionally tips his hand too much, pressing home his point that present-day prosperity isn't all it's cracked up to be, no matter. I doubt that this inspired and elegiac novel will ever leave those who are lucky enough to read it--proving after all the persistence of the clann Chalum Ruaidh. --Kerry Fried [via]

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No Great Mischief Proof

by Alistair MacLeod

ISBN 0224065475 (0-224-06547-5)
Hardcover, Hodder General Publishing Division

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No Great Mischief Proof: ISBN 0224065475 (0-224-06547-5)
Hardcover, Hodder General Publishing Division

To Every Thing There Is A Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story

by Alistair MacLeod , Peter Rankin

ISBN 077105565X (0-7710-5565-X)
Hardcover, McClelland & Stewart Ltd

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To Every Thing There Is A Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story: ISBN 077105565X (0-7710-5565-X)
Hardcover, McClelland & Stewart Ltd

Alistair MacLeod (MacLeod, Alistair)

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Alistair MacLeod (MacLeod, Alistair)

new books, used books, rare books by Alistair MacLeod

Founded in 1997, BookFinder.com has become a leading book price comparison site: Find and compare hundreds of millions of new books, used books, rare books and out of print books from over 100,000 booksellers and 60+ websites worldwide.

Coauthors & Alternates

Learn More at LibraryThing

Founded in 1997, BookFinder.com has become a leading book price comparison site:

Find and compare hundreds of millions of new books, used books, rare books and out of print books from over 100,000 booksellers and 60+ websites worldwide.