How long does it take to read No Great Mischief?
Alistair MacLeod
No Great Mischief by Alistair MacLeod takes about 5 hours 11 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 11 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1999. 283 pages, about 77,825 words.
11 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 8 hours 39 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 11 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 15 minutes |
The page count is the median across 14 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Historical novel/family saga. The narrator Alexander MacDonald guides us through his family's mythic past as he recollects the heroic stories of his people: loggers, miners, drinkers, adventurers; men forever in exile, forever linked to their clan. There is the legendary patriarch who left the Scottish Highlands in 1779 and resettled in "the land of trees," where his descendants became a separate Nova Scotia clan. There is the team of brothers and cousins, expert miners in demand around the world for their dangerous skills. And there is Alexander and his twin sister, who have left Cape Breton and prospered, yet are haunted by the past. Elegiac, hypnotic, by turns joyful and sad, No Great Mischief is a spellbinding story of family, loyalty, and of the blood ties that bind us to the land from which our ancestors came.
Subjects: Brothers, Immigrants, Fiction, Scots, Uranium mines and mining, Young men
