The Law of Dreams
A Novel
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3.9 • 9 Ratings
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- $1.99
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- $1.99
Publisher Description
The “absorbing, unsparing, and beautifully written” story of a young man’s epic passage from innocence to experience during Ireland’s Great Potato Famine (The New York Times Book Review)
On his odyssey 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 an unforgettable generation of boy soldiers, brigands, street toughs and charming, willful girls—all struggling for survival in the aftermath of natural catastrophe magnified by political callousness and brutal neglect.
Peter Behrens transports the reader to another time and place for a deeply moving and resonant experience. Winner of Canada’s top literary prize, 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.
Customer Reviews
Dreams of my Mother
The first sentence captured me. My mothers father was from Scariff. I barely knew him, he dies when I was seven years old, and we lived far apart. I know he must have been in better circumstances than Ferguson, as he did not come over to New York until the late 1890's. At 15, he was conscripted by the British Army to fight in the Boar War. Rather than that, his mother gave him his passage. He had to find his way to Cork on his own, and on to New York. he never saw his mother again.
But the book gave me a very deep feeling of what my people went through. He must have had uncles and aunts and cousins who went through the famine, the workhouse, the leavings. Beautifully written. I now want to delve deeper in to the history of my family and the horrors they went through that lead to my existence here, in America.
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