O'Briens

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'Briengrandson of a potato-famine emigrant, and a backwoods boy, railroad magnate, patriarch, brooding soulPeter 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 courtshiptold in Behrens's gorgeous, honed stylebecomes 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 clanat the heart of the novelis 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.