Cape Breton Island is a green and craggy island of Nova Scotia, which means it lies on an edge of the continent and maybe on the edge of modern thought.

        Its isolation, its forbidding weather and the Scottish Highlanders who migrated to it in the late 18th and early 19th centuries kept it apart. The rest of the continent thrummed to the Industrial Age and the Information Age, but Cape Breton stayed an island of miners and fishermen who clung to their Gaelic language and ways.

        Of such apartness are romantic stories written, but truthful ones require both an insider and an artist. Cape Breton has Alistair MacLeod.

        In 33 years, Mr. MacLeod, who grew up in Cape Breton and is a former professor of English at the University of Windsor, has published one novel (No Great Mischief) and the 16 stories collected in Island. Almost every word has been about Cape Breton, but the restrained scope and output don't diminish the work's power.

        Mr. MacLeod's theme is the war between old and new; his protagonists are often young boys going off into the world. Mr. MacLeod's gift is that he can make that old story feel particular.

        In “The Return,” a 10-year-old Montreal boy makes his first visit to his Cape Breton grandparents. He's dressed up and taken to the coal mine to greet his grandfather as he emerges. “Before I can reply he places his two big hands on either side of my head and turns it back and forth very powerfully on my shoulders. I can feel the pressure of his calloused fingers squeezing hard against my cheeks and pressing my ears into my head and I can feel the fine, fine, coal dust which I know is covering my face and I can taste it from his thumbs which are close against my lips. It is not gritty as I had expected but is more like smoke than sand and almost like my mother's powder.”

        In other stories, old and new collide harder.

        In “The Tuning of Perfection,” a 78-year-old widower is pestered by a TV crew that wants to hear the authentic Gaelic songs — but only if they are made shorter, faster and happier. Mr. MacLeod does not play this for satire, but weaves in the tale of the man's marriage to eloquently evoke the world that birthed the songs.

        The stories in Island are in order of publication, and the early ones may feel old-fashioned. The characters seek closure, which can seem quaint to modern readers. And the Cape Bretonners are often made more soulful than the people outside, which can feel sentimental. By 1986's marvelous “Vision,” Mr. MacLeod leaves more unsaid.

        There are two clear delights in Mr. MacLeod's prose. First, the detail with which he renders danger; do not miss “Winter Dog” for its suspenseful description of a boy trapped in a squall.

        And second, the empathy with which he gives voice to the voiceless. “I would like to tell my wife and children something of the way my years pass by on the route to my inevitable death,” writes Mr. MacLeod in the most demanding story, 1976's “The Closing Down of Summer,” about a crew of miners reluctant to leave for their next assignment. “I would like to explain somehow what it is like to be a gladiator who fights always the impassiveness of water as it drips on darkened stone. And what it is like to work one's life in the tightness of confined space.”

        A short story is a confined space, too, and Island shows the good work that can be done within it.

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