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.
- Top Fiction eBooks - Available Now
- Top Nonfiction eBooks - Available Now
- Historical Fiction
- Biographies
- Mystery & Suspense
- Cooking & Food
- Science Fiction & Fantasy
- Recipe Included Cozy Mysteries
- See all
- Top Fiction Audiobooks - Available Now
- Top Nonfiction Audiobooks - Available Now
- Mystery & Suspense
- Business
- Literature
- Foreign Language Study
- Science Fiction
- Great Narrators
- Newly Added Audiobooks
- See all
- New Kids Titles
- Baddies in Books
- Feel Good Reads for Teens
- Read the Change You Wish To See in the World
- Thrillers for Teens
- Inclusive Kids' Reads
- Let's Start at the Very Beginning
- Do You Believe in Magic?
- New YA Titles
- Books to Rule Us All (YA)
- Being Young and In Love
- Tails and Tales: Animal Stories
- Prep School Page Turners
- See all