Fourteen of the 16 stories in Island have appeared in Alistair MacLeod’s two earlier short fiction collections. But it is the title story, one of the two new to book form, that epitomizes the theme of the collection as a whole, and is also the strongest of the lot in terms of structure and character development. That’s not to suggest that the rest of the collection is in any way flawed. MacLeod’s short stories are universally acclaimed, and deservedly so.

“Island,” however, most clearly bespeaks the themes of loss and isolation that run through the stories; the same elements provided the backdrop for MacLeod’s 1999 novel No Great Mischief. In “Island,” a woman becomes the last of her family line to run a lighthouse on an island two miles from the mainland. She represents the loss of a way of life and of a culture unique to the island of Cape Breton, where the Saskatchewan-born MacLeod grew up.

The isolation is evident in the remote coastal fishing villages that are the setting for almost all of MacLeod’s stories. Generations of Scots lived and died in such surroundings, battling the sea and the storms while preserving their Gaelic heritage and wanting nothing from the outside world. Isolation is also evident in the mindset of the people who are finally forced to go elsewhere to survive. They are marked wherever they go by their special legacies of family ties and the shared experiences of hardship – on the land, on the sea, or in mines that killed men at an early age.

The stories in this book were written over a period of 31 years, the most recent being 1999’s “Clearances.” But they are so much of a piece that the collection seems almost to have been created whole. An especially remarkable element is the consistent quality and stylishness of MacLeod’s prose, evocative always of the bittersweet melancholy of drastic cultural change. You can almost hear the manic screech of the fiddle music, and the lament of the piper at dusk on a craggy mountainside.