No Great Mischief

Fülszöveg

Fiction/Literature A NEW YORK TIMES NO TABLE BOOK "With ... No Great Mischief. . . American readers . . . have before them ... a new land that their imaginations can seize Üke a manifest destiny." -T HE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW In 1779 Calum MacDonald set sail in exile from the Highlands of Scotland with his wife and twelve children, along with the dog who would not be left behind and swam after the departing boát. After a catastrophic crossing he landed in the New World at Cape Breton, by which time he had become a widower and a grandfather. Two hundred years later, another MacDonald telis his story of coming of age as part of the clann Chalum Ruidah in that same bleakly beautiful Cape Breton landscape. Alexander is orphaned by a cruel accident on the ice, and his yearning for connection with family produces two luminous narrative strands: a summer spent in the mines with his wild older brothers that ends in murder and, much later, his tender care for one of those brothers, now... Tovább

Fülszöveg

Fiction/Literature A NEW YORK TIMES NO TABLE BOOK "With ... No Great Mischief. . . American readers . . . have before them ... a new land that their imaginations can seize Üke a manifest destiny." -T HE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW In 1779 Calum MacDonald set sail in exile from the Highlands of Scotland with his wife and twelve children, along with the dog who would not be left behind and swam after the departing boát. After a catastrophic crossing he landed in the New World at Cape Breton, by which time he had become a widower and a grandfather. Two hundred years later, another MacDonald telis his story of coming of age as part of the clann Chalum Ruidah in that same bleakly beautiful Cape Breton landscape. Alexander is orphaned by a cruel accident on the ice, and his yearning for connection with family produces two luminous narrative strands: a summer spent in the mines with his wild older brothers that ends in murder and, much later, his tender care for one of those brothers, now ailing. As a child, Alexander learned from his grandmoth- - er to,"always look after your blood." But blood and history are all but inescapable for the MacDonalds. The brothers still speak Gaelic to each other; legends lurk at the edge of the simplest conversation; language and music are themselves links to a heroic past. By turns epic and intimate, this is astonishing storytelling, informed by tradition and perfected by an exceptional craftsman. "A gorgeously worded . . . növel by an acknowledged master of the short story." -S A N FRANCISCO CHRON1CLE "Remarkable. . . . [MacLeod's] writing, graceful and elegiac, has the resonance of Steinbeck."-LOS ANGELES TIMES Vissza