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Product Description
Amazon.ca
Set in 1840s Ireland during the potato famine, this realistic and exactingly researched historical novel won the 2006 Governor General's award for fiction. Fergus is a teen when his parents and sisters are burned alive in their hut for refusing eviction by the local English farmer. After being taken to the local workhouse, Fergus flees and joins a band of young people called the Bog Boys who live in a swamp and, "quiet as smoke," scour the countryside for wild hares and bird eggs. Eventually, they attack the local farmer's house and raid his storehouse for butter and meat. Again, Fergus must flee. He emigrates to Liverpool where he is tenderly cared for in a brothel and ultimately leaves to work in Wales building the railroad. Throughout, it is Fergus' connection with horses that pulls him through adventures with thieves, murderers and loving, difficult women. The irresistible draw of America then tempts Fergus and his tough partner, Molly. The forty-day sea voyage to Montreal is harrowing and ends on the quarantine island of Grosse Île. A wealthy fur trader, who lost his own adopted son, helps Fergus escape into the New World where Fergus, now a young man, rides off for the States towing a line of horses that he hopes to sell. Behrens has written an engaging work with lovingly rendered characters. Although it is a simple coming of age story, the author's attention to detail brings the life and times of Fergus O'Brien thrillingly to life. --Mark Frutkin
Books in Canada
This historical drama digs into the catastrophic heart of the famine years in Ireland. Behrens’s tale-beautiful, brutal, compact-opens as a farmer-landlord rides through the “wreck of Ireland.” Not a villain but a three-dimensional man, the farmer is perplexed by the position in which he finds himself-confronted by the homeless, he is by turns irritated and kind. The focus shifts then to Fergus O’Brien, scion of a mountain family, staying put despite the potato blight. Returning one final autumn from “roaming” with his father, his mother tells him, “Life burns hot.” Sensuality, fever, fire-all burn hot. Fergus’s adventures and observations (“The law of dreams is, keep moving”) hasten the plot forward. From the day he stumbles from the family’s fire-razed cabin, the bodies of his sisters and parents smouldering behind him, this is Fergus’s story
All the page-turning suspense of a first-rate adventure is woven together with a young man’s coming of age. Valued by outlaws-by 1846, much of the Irish population-for his skill with horses and his innate trustworthiness, Fergus hits the road. Behrens portrays sex and its hues as vividly as he does the landscapes of Ireland and Wales-the latter a place where life among the Irish railway builders fairly leaps from the page. The “stone cities” of Liverpool, and later Montreal, emerge in all their money-centred vitality; they are stops on Fergus’s trail.
After his ejection from the land, we meet a series of memorable characters, from young Murty Larry, Fergus’s workhouse pal, to Molly, the woman with whom he at last sets sail for America (Quebec), and whose life up until then allows-or forces-her to betray their love at the merest prospect of increasing her stash. The unsentimental education of this illiterate, dreamily romantic mountain boy, along with the intensity and brilliance of Behrens’s thoroughly researched prose, shed new light on a hard history, telling a story of fear, love, and flight that, for better or worse, belongs to us all.
Nancy Wigston (Books in Canada)
All the page-turning suspense of a first-rate adventure is woven together with a young man’s coming of age. Valued by outlaws-by 1846, much of the Irish population-for his skill with horses and his innate trustworthiness, Fergus hits the road. Behrens portrays sex and its hues as vividly as he does the landscapes of Ireland and Wales-the latter a place where life among the Irish railway builders fairly leaps from the page. The “stone cities” of Liverpool, and later Montreal, emerge in all their money-centred vitality; they are stops on Fergus’s trail.
After his ejection from the land, we meet a series of memorable characters, from young Murty Larry, Fergus’s workhouse pal, to Molly, the woman with whom he at last sets sail for America (Quebec), and whose life up until then allows-or forces-her to betray their love at the merest prospect of increasing her stash. The unsentimental education of this illiterate, dreamily romantic mountain boy, along with the intensity and brilliance of Behrens’s thoroughly researched prose, shed new light on a hard history, telling a story of fear, love, and flight that, for better or worse, belongs to us all.
Nancy Wigston (Books in Canada)
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