The 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'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.