Set during the decades between the First and Second World Wars, Carry Me is a devastating historical saga about war, love, and escape, from the Governor General’s Literary Award–winning author of The Law of Dreams and The O’Briens.

Carry Me begins in 1909 on the Isle of Wight, England, and follows Billy Lange, the son of the skipper of a racing yacht belonging to a wealthy German-Jewish baron. Over the course of his childhood, Billy becomes entranced by the baron’s daughter, the elusive and willful Karin von Weinbrenner.

Golden Edwardian summers are soon shattered by the First World War, and when Billy and Karin are reunited on the baron’s Frankfurt estate in the aftermath the two bond over their fascination with the Wild West novels of Karl May and shared passion for speed, jazz, and the nightclubs of Frankfurt and Berlin. A childhood friendship deepens into a complex love affair while society loses its moral bearings and Germany marches toward the Second World War. This time, Billy and Karin dream of escape — from Germany and from history.

A vivid and powerfully rendered epic encompassing the two great wars of the twentieth century, Carry Me is both a sweeping historical novel and a love story for the ages.

Peter Behrens’s first novel, The Law of Dreams, won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and has been published in nine languages. His collection of short stories, Travelling Light, was reissued in 2013. The New York Times called his second novel, The O’Briens (2011), "a major achievement." Carry Me, his third novel, appeared in 2016. His stories and essays have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times, Tin House, Brick, Best Canadian Stories, Best Canadian Essays and many anthologies. Behrens is a native of Montreal and was educated at Lower Canada College, Concordia University, and McGill. He has held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University and was a 2015-16 Fellow at Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study.

Peter Behrens' profile page

• Short-listed, The Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature
• Short-listed, National Jewish Book Awards