Best Selling Books by Peter Behrens

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.

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.

A devastating novel of war, love, and escape from the award-winning author of The Law of Dreams and The O’Briens During childhood summers on the sunstruck Isle of Wight in the years before the First World War, Billy is entranced by Karin, the elusive daughter of a German-Jewish industrialist. Reunited on a Frankfurt estate in that war’s hungry aftermath, Karin and Billy become fascinated with tribal rituals found in the Wild West stories of Karl May, whose Winnetou tales are among the most popular books published in Germany. Coming of age in Frankfurt and Berlin, Karin and Billy share a passion for speed, jazz, and nightclubs. They also share a fantasy of escape—from darkening Germany, from history—to El Llano Estacado, the high plains of Texas and New Mexico, vividly reimagined in May’s fiction. Intriguing characters braid this intricate and harrowing story together, from golden Edwardian summers to London under Zeppelin attack, Ireland on the brink of its War of Independence, and Germany collapsing into the Hitler era. As a society loses its civic and moral bearings, a childhood friendship deepens into a love affair with extraordinarily high stakes. Brilliantly conceived and elegantly written, Carry Me is an epic for grown-ups, an unusual love story, and a lucid meditation on Europe’s violent twentieth century.

Contains papers from a conference held in Frauenchiemsee, Upper Bavaria, June 2002.

**Arrêt de commercialisation*** Billy Lange naît en 1909 sur l’île de Wight, où son père est skipper pour le compte d’un riche baron juif allemand. Enfant, il est fasciné par la fille du baron, l’insaisissable Karin von Weinbrenner. Après la Première Guerre mondiale qui contraint la famille Lange à émigrer, le hasard réunit de nouveau Billy et Karin sur la propriété du baron, près de Francfort. Dès lors, au fil des ans, tandis que la société perd ses repères moraux et que l’Allemagne marche vers le second conflit mondial, ils se découvrent des passions communes: le jazz, la vitesse, un tenace rêve d’évasion... Et, face à la montée du nazisme, aux traitements infligés au baron et à son entourage, les deux jeunes gens sont taraudés par une même question: faut-il rester ou se résoudre à fuir? Entrelaçant les souvenirs de Billy – son enfance anglaise, l’emprisonnement de son père soupçonné d’espionnage, le refuge dans une Irlande secouée par l’IRA, la fuite en Allemagne, l’entre-deux-guerres où se mêlent insouciance et signes annonciateurs d’un nouvel ordre des choses –, Peter Behrens offre un éclairage subtil et une fine compréhension de la «Grande Histoire». Brillamment construit, profondément émouvant, Les insouciants est une histoire d’amour, une épopée historique et une réflexion lucide sur la violence et la chute de l’Europe du xxe siècle. Un roman magistral.