Carry Me

December 21, 2015
Behrens (The Law of Dreams) grounds his bittersweet escape-from-the-Nazis love story in seascapes, landscapes, and cityscapes, showing how culture and geography shape lives and determine character. The novel consists of Billy Lange’s diary, along with assorted clippings and correspondence beginning in 1882, when Billy’s grandfather Heinrich (known as Captain Jack) registers his sea-born son Heinrich (Buck) as a German citizen who grows up to become the German-Jewish Baron von Weinbrenner’s racing skipper. Buck’s son—named Hermann but known as Billy—grows up on the Baron’s Isle of Wight retreat, his closest companion the Baron’s daughter, Karin. During World War I, Buck is arrested and interned, while Billy and his mother move first to London, then Ireland. After the war, the Baron’s patronage brings them to Germany. Karin enjoys Berlin nightlife, and Billy has unexpected prosperity working as a translator. But with Hitler on the rise, and the aging Baron unable to safeguard his family, employees, or possessions, Billy plans to escape with Karin. In scenes such as the Baron’s funeral and a zeppelin raid, Behrens avoids sentimentality, evoking instead a subtle emotional mix. Likewise, good guys providing protection from bad guys find it more challenging than in old-fashioned westerns, and triumph over tragedy proves more complicated than in traditional family sagas. Behrens thereby revitalizes the war epic, substituting grand panoramas with realistic settings and great acts of heroism with small yet powerful acts of compassion.

September 1, 2015

The author of The Law of Dreams, which received Canada's Governor General's Literary Award for Fiction in 2006, returns with another significant historical saga, set in Europe between the world wars.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2015
Set in multiple European locations between 1914 and 1938, this ambitious novel provides a panoramic view of a continent and a microscopic view of two individuals hovering precariously between the two world wars. As an international crisis looms, the ties that bind childhood friends Billy Lange, the German Irish son of a racing skipper, and Karin von Weinbrenner, the free-spirited daughter of a German Jewish baron, deepen. After having spent childhood summers together on the Isle of Wight, they reconnect on the baron's estate outside of Frankfort after WWI. With political, economic, and social tensions swirling about them, they find refuge in the vividly imagined stories of Karl May, a German writer who set his wildly popular Wild West tales on the high plains of Texas and New Mexico. With Nazism entrenched and the Holocaust looming, Billy and Karin escape from an increasingly brutal and dangerous Germany, only to discover that you always carry the past with you. Moving seamlessly back and forth between times and countries, Behrens (The O'Briens, 2012) paints a stunningly intimate portrait in wide, universal strokes.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)