An unforgettable saga of love, loss, and exhilarating change spanning half a century in the lives of a restless family, from the author of the acclaimed novel The Law of Dreams.
The O’Briens is a family story unlike any told before, a tale that pours straight from the heart of a splendid, tragic, ambitious clan. In Joe O’Brien—grandson of a potato-famine emigrant, and a backwoods boy, railroad magnate, patriarch, brooding soul—Peter Behrens gives us a fiercely compelling man who exchanges isolation and poverty in the Canadian wilds for a share in the dazzling riches and consuming sorrows of the twentieth century.
When Joe meets Iseult Wilkins in Venice, California, the story of their courtship—told in Behrens’s gorgeous, honed style—becomes the first movement in a symphony of the generations. Husband and wife, brothers, sisters-in-law, children and grandchildren, the O’Briens engage unselfconsciously with their century, and we experience their times not as historical tableaux but as lives passionately lived. At the heart of this clan—at the heart of the novel—is mystery and madness grounded in the history of Irish sorrow. The O’Briens is the story of a man, a marriage, and a family, told with epic precision and wondrous imagination.
The O'Briens
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“Impressive . . . World War II hovers in this novel’s path like flak and rips the lives of the novel’s characters to shreds. The last hundred pages are a powerful evocation of that war’s effect . . . A major accomplishment. “
—The New York Times Book Review
“As befits a saga so ambitious in design, there is an able mixture of agony and ecstasy throughout. Time and time again, Behrens proves himself a first-rate seanchaí, the Irish term for a storyteller, by bringing the O’Brien clan to life on the page. En route, he fashions a topographically capacious narrative that relishes the scents of Santa Barbara, the pastoral beauty of the Ojai Valley and the tidal mantras of coastal Maine.”
—The Washington Post
“Powerful . . . Moments of grace and romance are rocked by cruel words and violence in this epic, a piece of rough beauty itself.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Illuminating . . . An epic along the lines of Middlesex in the way it follows a family through time and examines the results of their actions . . . A brooding novel, engrossing in its scope and detail, The O’Briens keeps sight of the family’s personal stories amid the larger history of much of the twentieth century.”
—Booklist
“Behrens’s characters are engaging and the history of the various cities, budding industries, and wars expertly handled.”
—Library Journal
“Peter Behrens’s family saga The O’Briens (Pantheon) spans the first half of the Canadian twentieth century, finding a parallel epic in an unforgettable narrative of marriage.”
—Vogue.com
“The next generation in Irish literature . . . A fascinating depiction of how Irish sorrow ripples through time.”
—Bookpage
“[A] deftly painted portrait of a marriage . . . Two smart, determined individuals are hardly the recipe for a tranquil marriage. But they certainly make life—and fiction—more interesting.”
—The Seattle Times
“Gritty and nimble, leaping from point to point and character to character, and breaking as many links of chain as it builds . . . The O’Briens has the surprising, sometimes-random quality of real life rather than the plotted-ness of a conventional novel. Births are balanced by deaths; lives take unexpected turns; characters leave and are heard from years later.”
—The Columbus Dispatch
“Brimming with character and incident, even more ambitious in scope than its prizewinning predecessor, The Law of Dreams . . . Behrens celebrates the warmth of human attachments without pretending they can ever entirely dispel the existential chill of mortality and loneliness.”
—The Daily Beast
“The story of Joe O'Brien and his family is epic in its scope (the building of the North American railroads, two world wars, the Depression, Prohibition, children and grandchildren, businesses built and lost and restarted) and lifetimes unfold in its pages. That the lives hold our attention so closely is a tribute to Behrens' beautiful writing, and a reminder of just how vital, brutal, and pervasive, love is.”
—Huffington Post
“The O’Briens is the story of a marriage and a family moving through history—from the first flying machines, through two world wars, to the election of JFK—told with epic precision and wondrous imagination.” —Birmingham News
“This is a saga that warrants your attention. This is a story whose quiet brilliance can’t be ignored. It’s an intimate epic, if that makes sense—a portrait of an entire world through the lens of a single bloodline. All the joy and passion, all the anger and fear, all the love and loss involved in simply living and being—that’s what Peter Behrens has captured with The O’Briens.” —The Maine Edge
“This is a family saga with triumphs and tragedies.”
—Daily American
"[A] really, really good, beautifully written book."
—Bill Goldstein, NBC-TV's "Weekend Today in New York
—The New York Times Book Review
“As befits a saga so ambitious in design, there is an able mixture of agony and ecstasy throughout. Time and time again, Behrens proves himself a first-rate seanchaí, the Irish term for a storyteller, by bringing the O’Brien clan to life on the page. En route, he fashions a topographically capacious narrative that relishes the scents of Santa Barbara, the pastoral beauty of the Ojai Valley and the tidal mantras of coastal Maine.”
—The Washington Post
“Powerful . . . Moments of grace and romance are rocked by cruel words and violence in this epic, a piece of rough beauty itself.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Illuminating . . . An epic along the lines of Middlesex in the way it follows a family through time and examines the results of their actions . . . A brooding novel, engrossing in its scope and detail, The O’Briens keeps sight of the family’s personal stories amid the larger history of much of the twentieth century.”
—Booklist
“Behrens’s characters are engaging and the history of the various cities, budding industries, and wars expertly handled.”
—Library Journal
“Peter Behrens’s family saga The O’Briens (Pantheon) spans the first half of the Canadian twentieth century, finding a parallel epic in an unforgettable narrative of marriage.”
—Vogue.com
“The next generation in Irish literature . . . A fascinating depiction of how Irish sorrow ripples through time.”
—Bookpage
“[A] deftly painted portrait of a marriage . . . Two smart, determined individuals are hardly the recipe for a tranquil marriage. But they certainly make life—and fiction—more interesting.”
—The Seattle Times
“Gritty and nimble, leaping from point to point and character to character, and breaking as many links of chain as it builds . . . The O’Briens has the surprising, sometimes-random quality of real life rather than the plotted-ness of a conventional novel. Births are balanced by deaths; lives take unexpected turns; characters leave and are heard from years later.”
—The Columbus Dispatch
“Brimming with character and incident, even more ambitious in scope than its prizewinning predecessor, The Law of Dreams . . . Behrens celebrates the warmth of human attachments without pretending they can ever entirely dispel the existential chill of mortality and loneliness.”
—The Daily Beast
“The story of Joe O'Brien and his family is epic in its scope (the building of the North American railroads, two world wars, the Depression, Prohibition, children and grandchildren, businesses built and lost and restarted) and lifetimes unfold in its pages. That the lives hold our attention so closely is a tribute to Behrens' beautiful writing, and a reminder of just how vital, brutal, and pervasive, love is.”
—Huffington Post
“The O’Briens is the story of a marriage and a family moving through history—from the first flying machines, through two world wars, to the election of JFK—told with epic precision and wondrous imagination.” —Birmingham News
“This is a saga that warrants your attention. This is a story whose quiet brilliance can’t be ignored. It’s an intimate epic, if that makes sense—a portrait of an entire world through the lens of a single bloodline. All the joy and passion, all the anger and fear, all the love and loss involved in simply living and being—that’s what Peter Behrens has captured with The O’Briens.” —The Maine Edge
“This is a family saga with triumphs and tragedies.”
—Daily American
"[A] really, really good, beautifully written book."
—Bill Goldstein, NBC-TV's "Weekend Today in New York
About the Author
Peter Behrens is the author of The Law of Dreams (which received Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and was published around the world to wide acclaim) and Night Driving, a collection of short stories. His stories and essays have appeared in many publications, including The Atlantic and Tin House. Honors he has received include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University’s Creative Writing Program.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
34 of 40 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
In the end, as in the beginning, it's about family.
Peter Behrens' first novel, The Law of Dreams, centered on the fierce attempt of a young, nineteenth-century Irishman to survive in a desperate world of famine and exploitation after his family had been violently erased from the narrow patch of earth that was his home. The key to that survival was to keep moving, from Ireland, to England, and on to North America, in the hope of constructing a new life. In this second novel, The O'Briens, Behrens examines what it means to construct a life, not just for a newcomer in a new land, but for anyone.
Behrens' other great subject, besides family, is place. We first encounter Joe O'Brien and his younger brothers and sisters, descendants of the hero of Behrens' previous book, in the early twentieth century, coming of age in Pontiac County, in western Quebec. It's hard to imagine the light of the modern world ever breaking in on this darkly wooded, isolated landscape. The siblings, each in his or her way shaped by that environment, leave and begin to disperse, seeking to make of their lives whatever their talents and opportunities might allow them.
In time, we follow Joe from the evanescent, ghostly canals of the freshly built tracts of Venice, California, where he meets his wife-to-be, Iseult, to the harsh terrain of central and western Canada, where he establishes the basis for his fortune by contracting for the laying of railroad track across the mountains. It is also here that he and Iseult begin their family. As that family grows, the next phases of the story play out, from Santa Barbara to Kennebunk to Montreal. History, place, and event are all densely and exquisitely evoked, from the early twentieth century to World War 2 and beyond.
Through it all runs the attempt of the men and women of this large and varied family to come to terms with themselves and their interconnections, a task that Behrens shows doesn't always-- perhaps can't ever-- lead to complete success, above all in relation to the mysteries that envelope that most intimate of connections, marriage. There are things we can't know about ourselves, or about those to whom we're attached by blood and love. Behrens doesn't just uncover the universal revelations, betrayals, tragedies, and small triumphs that mark most lives; he also manages to place them within the everyday particularities of time and place.
These individuals and their world are movingly imagined and described. The O'Briens is a sweeping, emotionally engaging read that begins, and ends, where the richest and most honest stories so often do-- in the open-ended struggle to know and define ourselves amid the places and people we daily affect and to which we're inescapably bound.
Peter Behrens' first novel, The Law of Dreams, centered on the fierce attempt of a young, nineteenth-century Irishman to survive in a desperate world of famine and exploitation after his family had been violently erased from the narrow patch of earth that was his home. The key to that survival was to keep moving, from Ireland, to England, and on to North America, in the hope of constructing a new life. In this second novel, The O'Briens, Behrens examines what it means to construct a life, not just for a newcomer in a new land, but for anyone.
Behrens' other great subject, besides family, is place. We first encounter Joe O'Brien and his younger brothers and sisters, descendants of the hero of Behrens' previous book, in the early twentieth century, coming of age in Pontiac County, in western Quebec. It's hard to imagine the light of the modern world ever breaking in on this darkly wooded, isolated landscape. The siblings, each in his or her way shaped by that environment, leave and begin to disperse, seeking to make of their lives whatever their talents and opportunities might allow them.
In time, we follow Joe from the evanescent, ghostly canals of the freshly built tracts of Venice, California, where he meets his wife-to-be, Iseult, to the harsh terrain of central and western Canada, where he establishes the basis for his fortune by contracting for the laying of railroad track across the mountains. It is also here that he and Iseult begin their family. As that family grows, the next phases of the story play out, from Santa Barbara to Kennebunk to Montreal. History, place, and event are all densely and exquisitely evoked, from the early twentieth century to World War 2 and beyond.
Through it all runs the attempt of the men and women of this large and varied family to come to terms with themselves and their interconnections, a task that Behrens shows doesn't always-- perhaps can't ever-- lead to complete success, above all in relation to the mysteries that envelope that most intimate of connections, marriage. There are things we can't know about ourselves, or about those to whom we're attached by blood and love. Behrens doesn't just uncover the universal revelations, betrayals, tragedies, and small triumphs that mark most lives; he also manages to place them within the everyday particularities of time and place.
These individuals and their world are movingly imagined and described. The O'Briens is a sweeping, emotionally engaging read that begins, and ends, where the richest and most honest stories so often do-- in the open-ended struggle to know and define ourselves amid the places and people we daily affect and to which we're inescapably bound.
15 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review
(What's this?)
The story begins in the rugged wilderness of Canada as the 19th century turns to the twentieth. Joe O'Brien, the eldest son of an Irish Catholic family, becomes responsible for his brothers and sisters when his father dies. He feeds them, eliminates an abusive step-father, and provides opportunities for each of his siblings.
He runs his own sawmill and eventually becomes an industrial businessman. After his success, he meets the love of his life and weds her. The story then follows the O'Briens as they raise a family, centering on the interrelationships between husband and wife, father and children, mother and children and their relationship to the world. The characters are believable and dynamic and the story deals with love and death as it progresses from WWI to WWII.
Peter Behrens's writing is descriptive, his dialogue spot on, and his words are lyrical. I enjoyed reading it and thinking about the universal themes it explores. There were some very poignant moments in the book and I would give it 4.5 stars if the rating system allowed.
He runs his own sawmill and eventually becomes an industrial businessman. After his success, he meets the love of his life and weds her. The story then follows the O'Briens as they raise a family, centering on the interrelationships between husband and wife, father and children, mother and children and their relationship to the world. The characters are believable and dynamic and the story deals with love and death as it progresses from WWI to WWII.
Peter Behrens's writing is descriptive, his dialogue spot on, and his words are lyrical. I enjoyed reading it and thinking about the universal themes it explores. There were some very poignant moments in the book and I would give it 4.5 stars if the rating system allowed.
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
I'd read Behrens's first book The Law of Dreams so when I heard his second book was available I couldn't wait to get my hands on it. I wasn't disappointed. From the first unforgettable scene set in the early 1900s in the outback of Quebec in which a priest teaches a group of rough-hewn siblings to waltz in his improbably refined living room ("It wasn't that he loved the dance....What he was trying to teach was courage."), I couldn't put the book down. If I'd had to keep reading by flashlight I would have. Until the batteries ran out. The writing is gorgeous (having read The Law of Dreams I expected that), and once again the historical setting is so seamlessly and convincingly woven into the story that I felt for a few days I was living in the first half of the twentieth century. The first book has a compact elegance, but The O'briens is wonderfully complicated and layered, the many characters beautifully and compelling drawn. Finishing it late at night was like taking the last bite of the ginger cake my friend Virginia makes from-scratch, deliciously sad; I tried to make it last, but I couldn't stop reading. I miss Joe and Iseult and Frankie already.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Emperor has no clothes
I was very disappointed in the book given the rave reviews. It started out really well....good character development. Solid plot lines. Read more
Published 15 days ago by joanbliss1
5.0 out of 5 stars
Well written.
Could hardly put it down. Awesome story line. Depiction of characters was excellent. Would read more books by this author.
Published 19 days ago by Catalyst
5.0 out of 5 stars
The power of family for early immigrants
he O'Briens showcases what an epic family story should look like. The story focuses on Joe O'Brien, grandson of an Irish immigrant. Read more
Published 23 days ago by Andrew Keyser
3.0 out of 5 stars
3.5 out of 5
******Possible spoilers******
Peter Behrens has a elegant way of description and characterization. Read more
Peter Behrens has a elegant way of description and characterization. Read more
Published 1 month ago by HardyBoy64
2.0 out of 5 stars
Why Did I Finish This?
I reserved this book when my local paper gave it a good review. After reading the Amazon reviews, more kindly than mine, I should have realized what I was in for. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Pesso
5.0 out of 5 stars
Nice
Gotta love this book and that cover pic is awesome - spent many happy years in my hometown of Jackson Hole and this is a very familiar sight!!
Published 2 months ago by Tina
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing Epic. Epically Amazing
I should confess that I love Canadian authors and books set in Canada. So when I heard that this book was coming out, I knew that I had to get my hands on it. Read more
Published 2 months ago by D. Sorel
4.0 out of 5 stars
Intelligently written novel
This is an amazingly well written novel, Peter Behrens composes with great intelligence, I thoroughly enjoyed this read and will be seeking out more reads from this author. Read more
Published 3 months ago by Christy Hawley
4.0 out of 5 stars
The O'Briens
The book was very interesting and I really enjoyed it. However, the ending was sort of strange. I do like Behren's writing style.
Published 3 months ago by lorraine
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good read
I enjoyed this book very much as a family saga. I noticed it because my last name used to be O'Brien.
Published 3 months ago by Mamamac
