No Great Mischief

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian Studies at
Concordia University and an avid outdoor recreationist. She is the
author of several books, including The Mountain Is Moving: Japanese
Women’s Lives, Kurlek and Margaret Laurence: T

This is the first paperback edition of Alistair MacLeod’s national
bestseller, which won the 1999 Trillium Award and the Canadian
Booksellers Association Libris Award for Book of the Year.

MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, in 1936, and raised
in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. His fictional focus has always been on the
hardy islanders of Cape Breton, their work and loves and tragic losses.

No Great Mischief is a tale of loyalties to family, blood ties, and
ancestral memories. The complex narrative intersperses some 200 years of
Highland history with events in the 1980s as the narrator, Alexander
MacDonald, tells the story of his immediate family and its heroic past.
The MacDonalds are loggers, miners, drinkers, and adventurers. They have
not forgotten their forefathers, who left the Scottish Highlands in 1779
to resettle in Nova Scotia, and the hardships they suffered. Nor have
they forgotten how earlier clan members were beaten when they spoke
Gaelic in school.

Alexander is a prosperous Ontario orthodontist. His older brothers are
specialist shaft miners in the uranium mines at Elliot Lake. When a
French-Canadian miner is injured in an accident, serious tensions
between the MacDonald clan and the local French Canadians grow steadily
through a long hot summer of discontent—tensions not unlike those that
led to the 1759 Battle of Quebec, which the English won with the help of
the Highlanders.

MacLeod writes with great simplicity and emotional honesty as he weaves
together the disparate worlds of past and present. The effect is
powerfully moving. Praise for the hardcover edition includes Alice
Munro’s description of scenes “burned forever” into the mind, and
Farley Mowat’s conviction that this story, both lament and
celebration, will endure. No Great Mischief is undoubtedly an impressive
work.