Desperately in need of money, the mother tries to convince the father to sell the horse to a knacker, who disposes of old or unwanted animals, harvesting whatever he can from them. In "In the Fall," an impoverished mining family debates what to do with their old pit horse. The young man soon leaves home for good, though the fact that he left his mother behind still ails him as much as his father’s gruesome death at sea. The father’s bloated body washes up in late November, and the narrator’s mother receives a meager pension on which to live. One day, father and son are caught in a winter storm, and the father gets swept away. His father protests, so the narrator makes a pact with his father: He will remain on the island and help the family business for as long as his father is alive. As his father ages, however, he determines to give up his books and go into the family business of fishing. The narrator’s sisters all eventually marry and leave home, and the narrator himself entertains leaving home for studies.
His mother is strong, stoic, and fearless, while his father, who is a fisherman, is quiet and diligent. In the first story, "The Boat," a professor reflects on his youth and upbringing on Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia, Canada. TheGuardian calls Island "provokingly singular and rare, an island of richness." Island: The Complete Stories (2000) contains every story Canadian author Alistair MacLeod published in his two previous collections- The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and Other Stories-along with two new stories that were previously unpublished.
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