Alistair MacLeod 
Island: The Complete Stories 

Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award: “The genius of his stories is to render his fictional world as timeless.”—Colm Tóibín

The sixteen exquisitely crafted stories in
Island prove Alistair Mac Leod 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 Mac Leod’s stories convince us of the importance of tradition, the beauty of the landscape, and the necessity of memory.

Om författaren

Alistair Mac Leod (1936—2014), raised in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, was an acclaimed Canadian novelist, short story writer, and academic.