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Overview
The O’Briens is an unforgettable saga of love, loss, and change spanning half a century in the lives of a restless patriarch and his splendid, tragic, ambitious clan.
In Joe O’Brien—backwoods boy, railroad magnate, 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 possibilities and consuming sorrows of the twentieth century. When Joe meets Iseult Wilkins in Venice-by-the-Sea, California, their courtship becomes the first movement in a symphony of the generations. The O’Briens is the story of a marriage and a family moving through the turbulence of history, told with epic precision and wondrous imagination.
Editorials
From the Publisher
“Behrens proves himself a first-rate storyteller. . . . As befits a saga so ambitious in design, there is an able mixture of agony and ecstasy throughout.” —The Washington Post"Impressive . . . World War II hovers in this novel’s path like flak and rips the lives of the novel’s characters to shreds. The last hundred pages are a powerful evocation of that war’s effect . . . A major accomplishment.” —The New York Times Book Review
“A fascinating depiction of how Irish sorrow ripples through time.” —Bookpage
“Epic in its scope . . . lifetimes unfold in its pages. That the lives hold our attention so closely is a tribute to Behrens’s beautiful writing, and a reminder of just how vital, brutal, and pervasive love is.” —Huffington Post
“Brimming with character and incident, even more ambitious in scope than its prizewinning predecessor, The Law of Dreams. . . . Behrens celebrates the warmth of human attachments without pretending they can ever entirely dispel the existential chill of mortality and loneliness.” —The Daily Beast
“Gritty and nimble. . . . The O’Briens has the surprising, sometimes-random quality of real life rather than the plotted-ness of a conventional novel.” —The Columbus Dispatch
“A deftly painted portrait of a marriage.” —The Seattle Times
“Peter Behrens’s family saga The O’Briens spans the first half of the Canadian twentieth century, finding a parallel epic in an unforgettable narrative of marriage.” —Vogue.com
“This is a saga that warrants your attention. This is a story whose quiet brilliance can’t be ignored. It’s an intimate epic, if that makes sense—a portrait of an entire world through the lens of a single bloodline. All the joy and passion, all the anger and fear, all the love and loss involved in simply living and being—that’s what Peter Behrens has captured with The O’Briens.” —The Maine Edge
“Impressive in its scope and ambitious in its goals. Some of [the] descriptions are flat-out jaw-dropping . . . In giving his family a past few of them knew existed, Behrens has made The O’Briens unforgettably alive.” —The Globe and Mail
“Having read both Buddenbrooks and The O’Briens this summer, I can affirm they are definitely in the same league—great, juicy tales that will make you take a second look at annoying relatives. They are, after all, part of the big picture, otherwise known as history and destiny.” —The Gazette (Montreal)
“Illuminating . . . An epic along the lines of Middlesex in the way it follows a family through time and examines the results of their actions . . . A brooding novel, engrossing in its scope and detail, The O’Briens keeps sight of the family’s personal stories amid the larger history of much of the twentieth century.” —Booklist
“Powerful . . . Moments of grace and romance are rocked by cruel words and violence in this epic, a piece of rough beauty itself.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
James McElroy
As befits a saga so ambitious in design, there is an able mixture of agony and ecstasy throughout. Time and time again, Behrens proves himself a first-rate seanchaí, the Irish term for a storyteller, by bringing the O'Brien clan to life on the page. En route, he fashions a topographically capacious narrative that relishes the scents of Santa Barbara, the pastoral beauty of the Ojai Valley and the tidal mantras of coastal Maine.—The Washington Post
John Vernon
…impressive…[Behrens's] narration…says no more than it needs to. Its exactitude sometimes embodies a lyricism that's never dreamy, always useful and precise…The O'Briens is a major accomplishment.—The New York Times Book Review