No Great Mischief

"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."