No Great Mischief
by Alistair MacLeod
Buy on AmazonHistorical novel/family saga. The narrator Alexander MacDonald guides us through his family's mythic past as he recollects the heroic stories of his people: loggers, miners, drinkers, adventurers; men forever in exile, forever linked to their clan. There is the legendary patriarch who left the Scottish Highlands in 1779 and resettled in "the land of trees," where his descendants became a separate Nova Scotia clan. There is the team of brothers and cousins, expert miners in demand around the world for their dangerous skills. And there is Alexander and his twin sister, who have left Cape Breton and prospered, yet are haunted by the past.…
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"That’s a wonderful book. Alistair McLeod hasn’t written an awful lot; that novel is his most recent production, and he has a collection of short stories, “Island”, that is in some ways even better. The novel’s about a family in Canada today and how they connect with their past and their heritage, and their Highland background. It’s not setting out consciously to explore all this in any explicit way, it’s just the background to the novel, but it comes at the whole theme in a way no purely factual book could. It’s won a lot of awards and it’s a terrific book."
The Highland Clearances · fivebooks.com