The Law of Dreams: A Novel

Peter Behrens

Jul 2009 · Steerforth

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The “absorbing, unsparing, and beautifully written” story of a young man’s epic passage from innocence to experience during Ireland’s Great Potato Famine (The New York Times Book Review)
 
On his odyssey through Ireland and Britain, and across the Atlantic to “the Boston states,” Fergus is initiated to violence, sexual heat, and the glories and dangers of the industrial revolution. Along the way, he meets an unforgettable generation of boy soldiers, brigands, street toughs and charming, willful girls—all struggling for survival in the aftermath of natural catastrophe magnified by political callousness and brutal neglect.
 
Peter Behrens transports the reader to another time and place for a deeply moving and resonant experience. Winner of Canada’s top literary prize, The Law of Dreams is gorgeously written in incandescent language that unleashes the sexual and psychological energies of a lost world while plunging the reader directly into a vein of history that haunts the ancestral memory of millions in a new millennium.

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Peter Behrens’ short stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Tin House, Saturday Night, and The National Post and have been anthologized in Best Canadian Stories and Best Canadian Essays. He is the author of a collection of short stories, Night Driving (Macmillan). Behrens was a Fellow of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and held a prestigious Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. He was born in Montreal and lives on the coast of Maine with his wife and son.