The Lost Salt Gift of Blood - Hardcover

MacLeod, Alistair

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224032194 ISBN 13: 9780224032193

Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 1991

Synopsis

A collection of 12 stories by this Canadian author. All of the stories are set in Cape Breton on the Atlantic Coast, in the communities of emigre Scots highlanders whose way of life has scarcely changed in hundreds of years.

About this title

About the Author:

Alistair MacLeod was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, in 1936 and raised among an extended family in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. He still spends his summers in Inverness County, writing in a clifftop cabin looking west towards Prince Edward Island. In his early years, to finance his education he worked as a logger, a miner, and a fisherman, and writes vividly and sympathetically about such work.

His early studies were at the Nova Scotia Teachers College, St. Francis Xavier, the University of New Brunswick and Notre Dame, where he took his Ph.D. He has also taught creative writing at the University of Indiana. Working alongside W.O. Mitchell, he was an inspiring teacher to generations of writers at the Banff Centre. In the spring of 2000, MacLeod retired from the University of Windsor, Ontario, where he was a professor of English.

He has published two internationally acclaimed collections of short stories: The Lost Salt Gift of Blood (1976) andAs Birds Bring Forth the Sun (1986). In 2000, these two books, accompanied by two new stories, were published in a single-volume edition entitledIsland: The Collected Stories of Alistair MacLeod. In 1999, MacLeod’s first novel,No Great Mischief, was published to great critical acclaim, and was on national bestseller lists for more than a year. The novel won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Dartmouth Book Award for Fiction, the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award, The Trillium Award for Fiction, the CAA-MOSAID Technologies Inc. Award for Fiction, and at the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Awards, MacLeod won for Fiction Book of the Year and Author of the Year.No Great Mischief was also a finalist for the Pearson Canada Reader’s Choice Award at The Word on the Street.

Alistair MacLeod and his wife, Anita, have six children. They live in Windsor.

From the Back Cover:

This evocative and haunting collection is set in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, a remote region where Gaelic is still spoken, old legends live on, and the same cold sea that washes the Hebrides beats against the granite cliffs. With a tearing lyricism 'The Lost Salt Gift of Blood' lays bare the joys, the fears, the darkness, and the shining hopes of communities whose isolation is at once a curse and a blessing.

Alistair MacLeod is one of Canada's most acclaimed writers, yet his entire life work consists of little more than a dozen published short stories. This volume contains all of them.

"MacLeod writes with the sort of intensity that gives his beautifully shaped sentences the haunting power of the Gaelic songs which are within him."
THE TIMES

"MacLeod's melancholy and startlingly beautiful stories are like live wires, their currents of memory and grief shocking through their unprotected simplicity ... each one is like a novel boiled down to its essence."
OBSERVER

"MacLeod belongs to that very special breed of writer who uses a specific place and its people to convey a universal experience. This is a fine collection."
GLASGOW HERALD

About this edition

• Publisher: Jonathan Cape Ltd
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0224032194
• ISBN 13: 9780224032193
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 257