Peter Behrens's Governor General's award-winning and critically acclaimed bestseller is gorgeously written, Homeric in scope, and haunting in its depiction of a young man's perilous journey from innocence to experience.

The Law of Dreams follows Fergus O'Brien from Ireland to Liverpool and Wales during the Great Potato Famine of 1847, and then beyond -- to a harrowing Atlantic crossing to Montreal. On the way, Fergus loses his family, discovers a teeming world beyond the hill farm where he was born, and experiences three great loves.

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, Amazon.ca/Books in Canada Best First Book
• Short-listed, CBA Libris Award for Fiction Book of the Year
• Short-listed, Commonwealth Writers' Prize - Best Book
• Winner, Governor General's Literary Awards: Fiction
• Winner, Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize

...Behrens has fashioned a beautiful idiom for his book, studded with slippery archaisms and mournful, musical refrains...the language and the things it describes seem to be spun out of a single material. And we move through it as willingly, or compulsively, as the protagonist, the wind of love and hate at our backs.

Newsday

An emotional epic bearing echoes of Melville and Ondaatje, conveying scents and shimmers of a vanished world under the skin of our own.

Jonathan Lethem

...an absorbing, unsparing and beautifully written account of one man's escape from the charnel house that Ireland became.

New York Times

...The Law of Dreams rings with a strange, hard poetry, a mingling of Behrens's rich narrative voice and scraps of startling wisdom that seem to emanate directly from Fergus's mind...In the life of this determined young man, Behrens illuminates one of the 19th century's greatest tragedies and the massive migration it launched. A novel that animates the past this vibrantly should make volumes of mere history blush. 'Life burns hot,' Fergus thinks, and so do these pages.

Washington Post

...enjoy the sprawling, cinematically rendered immigrant story.

Publishers Weekly

...a compelling read, notable for its spare, lyrical use of language.

Montreal Gazette

From a mountaintop in Ireland to the beckoning promise of America, there are scenes that will remain imprinted upon the reader's mind. Peter Behrens is a tremendously talented writer.

Alistair MacLeod

Inspired by his own family history, Behrens has fashioned a paean to the strength of the human spirit that illuminates a piece of history. The law of dreams is to keep moving, and that's what Fergus does, taking advantage of opportunities even as he is haunted by dreams and hurt by betrayal. Behrens tells this story in spare prose that distills ideas to their essence, making this absorbing historical fiction.

Booklist

This book is a beautifully written, poetically inspired tale of heroism, love, yes and sex, and the triumph of the human spirit over murderous greed. It's a long road that Behrens makes shorter with many a surprising turn. The Law of Dreams is one great book. I stayed up into the wee hours to finish it. I envy you this journey.

Malachy McCourt

The Law of Dreams lowers a tape recorder into the pit of history. All that was lost, everything we've forgotten, is suddenly restored. The research is prodigious, the story is epic, the structure is bold, and the ancient language is something new and wondrous to our ears.

Clark Blaise

...there is much in The Law of Dreams...to excite admiration.

Literary Review of Canada

The Law of Dreams is the best literary adventure novel I've read since Lonesome Dove, a brilliant heart-felt celebration of the capacity of the human spirit.

Howard Mosher

A lengthy yet surprisingly fast-moving story, The Law of Dreams is sure to establish this Canadian writer as a serious literary talent...Behrens' use of crisp dialogue clearly conveys the fear, the longing and the unbridled hope of a young man teetering on the brink between starvation and salvation. But it is in his economical narrative that Behrens truly shines. 'Life honed to the very edge. Sharpened on a whetstone. Chopping through the days. Working time like it was a sweep of hay.'

Winnipeg Free Press

One of the many fine things about Peter Behrens' stunningly lyric first novel, The Law of Dreams, is that it is emphatically a story of that great hunger, a work of richly empathetic imagination that reminds us once again of how powerful historical fiction can be in skilled hands. In fact, the story has a factual and emotional authenticity that calls to mind the similarly masterful debut Thomas Flanagan made with his now classic novel of Irish history, The Year of the French.

LA Times

An action-driven tale stuffed with fascinating historical research.

National Post