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As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories by Alistair MacLeod; Jane Urquhart (Afterword by)
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.
Call Number: PS 8575 .L459 A9 1992
ISBN: 9780771098826
Publication Date: 1992
No Great Mischief by Alistair Macleod
No Great Mischief is a story of family, bloodlines and loyalty. It is also a story of exile and the ties that bind us, generations later, to the lands from which our ancestors came. In 1779 Calum MacDonald set sail from the Highlands of Scotland with his extended family. The family settled in Cape Breton and grew and spread until it became almost a separate Nova Scotia clan, red-haired and dark-eyed. It is the 1980s by the time our narrator, Alexander MacDonald, tells the story of his family, marveling at how it intersects with history. Heart-rending, universal ironies echo through the generations of MacDonalds -- the many lives lived and the many deaths honored. The Celtic music of Cape Breton and the cadence of the Gaelic language ring throught this book, by turns joyful and sad, but always haunting.
Call Number: PS 8575 .L459 N62 2001 (+eBook)
ISBN: 1574904345
Publication Date: 2002
To Every Thing There Is a Season by Alistair Macleod; Peter Rankin (Illustrator)
The story is simple, seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old boy. As an adult he remembers the way things were back home on the farm on the west coast of Cape Breton. The time was the 1940s, but the hens and the cows and the pigs and the sheep and the horse made it seem ancient. The family of six children excitedly waits for Christmas and two-year-old Kenneth, who liked Halloween a lot, asks, “Who are you going to dress up as at Christmas? I think I’ll be a snowman.” They wait especially for their oldest brother, Neil, working on “the Lake boats” in Ontario, who sends intriguing packages of “clothes” back for Christmas. On Christmas Eve he arrives, to the delight of his young siblings, and shoes the horse before taking them by sleigh through the woods to the nearby church. The adults, including the narrator for the first time, sit up late to play the gift-wrapping role of Santa Claus. The story is simple, short and sweet, but with a foretaste of sorrow. Not a word is out of place. Matching and enhancingthe text are black and white illustrations by Peter Rankin, making this book a perfect little gift. For readers from nine to ninety-nine, our classic Christmas story by one of our greatest writers.
Call Number: PS 8575 .L459 T6 2004
ISBN: 9780771055652
Publication Date: 2004
Son of a Highlander by Alistair MacLeod
Son of a Highlander is the true story of the author, a third-generation Australian of Scottish Highland descent discovering his ancestral history over eight generations, from father to son. This is a search for authenticity of a verbal story handed down over a two-hundred-year period, along with a 1797 penny and a collection of photos and correspondence that are one hundred years old, which were from his late grandfather's old tattered leather case. The author descended from the Clan MacLeod--Clan meaning "Children in Scottish Gaelic," Mac meaning "son in Gaelic," and the Leod derived from the Viking era; it basically means "children of the son of Leod." The family originated from a small two-acre semisubsistent existence on the Isle of Skye in far western Scotland. The Macleod Clan was once a warrior race that feuded with neighboring clans in the most bloodiest of warfare. A clan system of traditions and culture that lasted hundreds of years that eventually came to an end with the notorious Highland Clearance, whereby thousands of people were evicted from their lands and replaced by sheep. With the mass exodus of people, some forcibly left while others left in desperation. This book is the history of one Highland family who survived a dangerous sailing journey to Australia only to continue their struggle against adversity on foreign soil. A search for the whereabouts of a Gaelic-speaking great-great-grandfather to discover he was sent to an island off the Australian coast, where he eventually died and was buried in a pauper's grave along with 8,500 souls, whose only crime was that they were poor. This book is a must read for anyone wishing to trace their own ancestral history. It will inspire you and encourage you toward your own personal voyage of discovery.
Call Number: PS 8575 .L459 S6 2015
ISBN: 9781514442807
Publication Date: 2015
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