The Law of Dreams

 Available at Amazon. 

The Law of Dreams tells the story of a young man's Homeric passage from innocence to experience during the Irish Famine of 1847. Peter Behrens transports the reader to another time and place for a resonant, unforgettable experience. 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. 

Absorbing, unsparing and beautifully written . . . a masterly novel. —The New York Times Book Review

The prose is frequently thrilling and always arresting. It is also unsparing in its determination to distil both the precise eternals of a moment and the fierce interiority of the human mind. The dialogue, too, seems to emerge from the mouths of characters who, though well represented in the pages of similar novels, have never been allowed to talk this way before. —Globe & Mail (Toronto)

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 Book World

When I opened Peter Behrens's "The Law of Dreams," last month, I thought, Oy vey, not another bleak, depressing, potato-famine, Irish-persecution, struggling-immigrant story. But I wound up loving this novel. The storytelling is terrific, the writing lyrical, often startling. —The New Yorker Online

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. —Los Angeles Times

. . . it is one of those rare books that comes along from time to time that makes you feel that you are in the presence of greatness: a gifted storyteller with a truly compelling story to tell. —Irish Sunday Independent