LIBRARY NOTES
 
Peter Behrens
The Law of Dreams
Wednesday, September 26, 2007 at 6:30 PM
Members' Room; $10 per person
The Law of Dreams tells the story of a young man's Homeric passage from innocence
to experience during the Irish Famine of 1847. On his epic journey 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 a lost generation of boy soldiers, brigands, street toughs, and charming, willful girls, all struggling for survival in the aftermath of natural catastrophe magnifed by political callousness and brutal neglect.
"Peter Behrens writes about the famine and its consequences as if he were an eyewitness," says the New York Times Book Review. "What Behrens knows, what he teaches us again in this masterly novel, is that the past was indeed wondrous, and terrible and strange, but that it was a very real place, lived by real men and women, and that it sits over us still."
Peter Behrens is a native of Montreal, where he was educated at Lower Canada College, Concordia, and McGill. He held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University and was a Fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. His other work includes a volume of short stories,
Night Driving, and writings in The Atlantic Monthly and many other publications.
The Law of Dreams, his first novel, won the 2006 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.
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