Canadian author Alastair MacLeod was descended from Scottish immigrants who made their home on the rugged landscape of the Cape Breton Islands. a place that MacLeod clearly loves and uses as the backdrop for the majority of his writing.
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood is a collection of short stories that was originally published in 1976, but that was republished in a subsequent collection years later with additional writings about the Island and another collection, As Birds Bring Forth the Sun & Other Stories.
The Cape Breton of MacLeod's stories is a somewhat mystical place, where the remoteness suggests ancient ritual, and seems to connect each of the characters in the stories with a past that they don't always understand but accept that they are permanently tied to. The narrative of each story is not so much plot driven as character driven, as the emotions and fears of each of the characters make up each story, rather than having an actual happening reported to the reader with a distinct beginning, middle and ending.
In 1995 the collection was translated into French, and subsequently won the John Glassco Translation Prize, thanks to the stellar translation of Florence Bernard.
MacLeod was best known as a writer of short stories, but when he did turn his hand to writing a novel he achieved incredible success. In 1999, he published No Great Mischief, the story of an orthodontist and his family living in Nova Scotia,, which was not only voted Atlantic Canada's greatest book of all time, but was also the recipient of a slew of awards, including the International Dublin Literary Award.
In 2005, the National Film Board released a documentary film about MacLeod and his literary career, with interviews with not just his family but also other prominent writers upon whom he and his work had been extremely influential. An opera based on one of his short stories was written by Christopher Donison, inspired by the descriptions of the landscape and the people of the Island.
