The Tin Flute

Alistair MacLeod has been hailed internationally as a master of the short story. Now MacLeod's collected stories, including two never before published, are gathered together for the first time in Island. These sixteen superbly crafted stories, most of them firmly based in Cape Breton even if its people stray elsewhere, depict men and women living out their lives against the haunting landscape that surrounds them. Focusing on the complexities and abiding mysteries at the heart of human relationships, MacLeod maps the close bonds and impassable chasms that lie between man and woman, parent and child, and invokes memory and myth to celebrate the continuity of the generations, even in the midst of unremitting change. Eloquent, humane, powerful, and told in a voice at once elegiac and life-affirming, the stories in this astonishing collection seize us from the outset and remain with us long after the final page. "Alistair MacLeod's stories are as regional and universal as the work of Faulkner or Chekhov. And they are, I think, as permanent."

–Michael Ondaatje

"Stunning. . . . The quality of the writing matches the very best in the world. . . . The stories are about us and here is that rare voice, a unique voice, to illuminate our experience."

–Edmonton Journal

"The book is a treasure. . . . These are stories well worth returning to, with layers to uncover gradually. . . . It doesn't get any better than this."

–Toronto Star

"If you buy one book this year, let it be Island. . . . You will have in your possession not only some of the best short stories written in the twentieth century, but some of the best short stories ever written in the English language. . . . These are universal stories for all time."

–Kitchener-Waterloo Record



"Every story is touched with the beauty and truth of genius"

–Irish Times

"One of the finest masters of prose in the world . . . these short stories have established MacLeod as a writer whose every word is set in place with clean and enduring perfections."

–Scotsman

"These stories have slowly become famous for their control of tone and cadence and for MacLeod's ability to handle pure, raw emotion. . . . Neither contemporary trend nor modern ironies interest him. The genius of his stories is to render his fictional world as timeless."

–Colm Tóibín

"MacLeod's lyricism succeeds in leaving a reader both harrowed by and envious of all the sorrow, violence and ravenous love."

-New York Times Book Review ALISTAIR MacLEOD (1936-2014), raised in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, was an acclaimed Canadian novelist, short story writer, and academic. One



Toward noon, Florentine had taken to watching out for the young man who, yesterday, while seeming to joke around, had let her know he found her pretty. The fever of the bazaar rose in her blood, a kind of jangled nervousness mingled with the vague feeling that one day in this teeming store things would come to a halt and her life would find its goal. It never occurred to her to think she could meet her destiny anywhere but here, in the overpowering smell of caramel, before the great mirrors hung on the wall with their narrow strips of gummed paper announcing the day's menu, to the summary clacking of the cash register, the very voice of her impatience. Everything in the place summed up for her the hasty, hectic poverty of her whole life here in St. Henri.

Over the shoulders of her half-dozen customers, her glance fled toward the counters of the store. The restaurant was at the back of the Five and Ten. In the glitter of the glassware, the chromed panels, the pots and pans, her empty, morose and expressionless ghost of a smile caught aimlessly on one glowing object after another.

Her task of waiting on the counter left her few moments in which she could return to the exciting, disturbing recollections of yesterday, except for tiny shards of time,