MacLeod's 1999 novel, "No Great Mischief" tells the story of the red-haired and dark-eyed MacDonald clan from 1779 when they left Scotland to settle in Cape Breton to more recent times. The judges, who awarded MacLeod the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award in 2001, described the novel as "a story of families, and of the ties that bind us to them. It is also a story of exile and of the ties that bind us, generations later, to the land from which our ancestors came." They went on to predict that the quality of MacLeod's writing would soon make his name a household word. "The music of the Cape Breton rings throughout this book, by turns joyful and sad but always haunting. Written in a hypnotic, stately prose where every word is perfectly placed, 'No Great Mischief' has the same haunting effect, and shows why the master craftsman took more than ten years to write it."