Winner of this year's IMPAC Award, MacLeod's beautiful first novel possesses all the power, strange lyric grace and atmosphere of his short stories reviewed elsewhere on these book pages . It is above all a family history told with the force of memory and mesmeric imagery born of vernacular storytelling. Alexander MacDonald, a middle-aged orthodontist visits Calum, his once all-powerful eldest brother now a sad, alcoholic wreck, living alone with the past in a dirty room. Everything appears to point to the tragic loss of their parents and another young brother in the vicious ice of Cape Breton years before. But their family's story began far further back, with a leave-taking in Scotland some 200 years earlier. Layers of story and history are brilliantly, almost lovingly evoked and recalled in a narrative that balances elegy and wonder with fact. The narrator and his twin sister, both raised by their grandparents after the accident, attempt to grasp a history that continues to embrace them. Dominated by a harsh, relentless landscape and alert to themes of isolation, identity and cultural tension, this is a profound, unforgettable work.
