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.

The O'Briens

Literature & Fiction

Behrens, Peter

Literary

Pantheon

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.

United States

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Night Driving

Gage Distribution Co

Driven from the only home he has known during Ireland’s Great Hunger of 1847, Fergus O’Brien makes the harrowing journey from County Clare to America, traveling with bold girls, pearl boys, navvies, and highwaymen. Along the way, Fergus meets his three passionate loves–Phoebe, Luke, and Molly–vivid, unforgettable characters, fresh and willful. Based on Peter Behrens’s own family history, The Law of Dreams is lyrical, emotional, and thoroughly extraordinary–a searing tale of ardent struggle and ultimate perseverance.

The Law of Dreams: A Novel

British & Irish

Random House Publishing Group

Showcasing selected works from The Museum of Modern Art's superlative architecture and design collection, Objects of Design features a wide variety of industrial and domestic artifacts by great designers of the modern period, from early masters such as Hector Guimard, Frank Lloyd Wright and Josef Hoffmann to contemporary practitioners including Droog Design, Ettore Sottsas, Gaetano Pesce, Hella Jongerius and others. Some of the objects represent turn-of-the-century designs of the Vienna Secession, Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts movement; others are Bauhaus and de Stijl explorations; still others show Charles and Ray Eames and other American designers of the second half of the twentieth century; representations of the Italian design revolutions; and contemporary manifestations of familiar genres using radical new materials and techniques of manufacture. The book's 360 color plates not only reveal the range of aesthetic viewpoints in design since the late nineteenth century but together trace the historical development of the Museum's celebrated design collection. In the introductory essay, Paola Antonelli, Curator, Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art, explores the history of modern design as well as the story of the museum's collection and its influence on the history of modern and contemporary design itself.

Objects of Design: The Museum of Modern Art

Arts & Photography

Noguchi, Isamu

Reed, Peter

Larsen, Christian

MOUNT, Christopher

Cline, Bevin

di Carlo, Tina

Lorch, Luisa

History & Criticism

The Museum of Modern Art, New York

First Bilingual Edition, Schocken, Seventh Printing, 1976; a remarkable book by a fascinating author

The Law of Dreams

House of Anansi Press

From Peter Behrens, one of our most beloved storytellers and the author of the bestselling and award-winning novels The Law of Dreams and The O’Briens, comes a spectacular collection of riveting stories about growing up and growing older, falling in and out of love, and finding ourselves and losing each other. 
 Moving from the magisterial streets of Montreal to the cramped spaces of New York City to the wide open plains of the west, these stories bring their settings magically alive, and within them offer us an incredible array of brilliantly imagined, richly drawn characters. If you liked Peter Behrens’ sweeping family sagas, then you will love this collection, full of the same ambition, heartache, and wisdom that have made him an essential voice of our times.

Travelling Light

Genre Fiction

Astoria

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.

Carry Me: A Novel

During Billy Lange’s childhood on the Isle of Wight, he is entranced by Karin, the wild and elusive daughter of a German-Jewish baron who employs Billy’s parents. Years later, after the upheavals of World War I, the two children are reunited on the baron’s Frankfurt estate. Billy and Karin first bond over the popular Wild West stories of Karl May, and later over their passion for jazz and Berlin nightclubs. But they also come to share a fantasy of escape from the 1930s Germany that is rapidly darkening around them—escape to the high plains of Texas and New Mexico they’d read about as children. Against the backdrop of Hitler’s rise to power, their friendship deepens into a love affair with extraordinarily high stakes. Brilliantly conceived and elegantly written, Peter Behrens’s Carry Me is both an epic love story and a lucid meditation on Europe’s violent twentieth century.

Anchor

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