Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
An award-winning novel which touches on the feelings of a modern Canadian keen to keep in touch with his Scottish roots. His Cape Breton family may have lived in the New World since 1779 but Scotland remains their true home.
Tell us about the Alistair McLeod book, 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.
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Professor James Hunter is director of the Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands. He is the author of 12 books about the Highlands including A Dance Called America, The Making of the Crofting Community and On the Other Side of Sorrow: Nature and People in the Scottish Highlands. He was the first director of the Scottish Crofters Union. He also chaired Highlands and Islands Enterprise, the north of Scotland’s development agency.
