Although he lives in Brooklin, Maine, Peter Behrens was in the other Brooklyn one recent day. The night before, he had been the guest of honor and had read from his new book “The Law of Dreams” at a party in New York City. “Dreams” came out in August, and since then, the first-time novelist has kept a busy calendar. He was eager to get back to Brooklin.

Because the book is set in Ireland during the potato famine of the 1840s, Behrens, an Irish-Canadian born in Montreal, has been to a good number of Irish heritage centers, Irish bars, and was even invited to attend Mass at one stop. On Wednesday, he’ll return to his native country to receive the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, Canada’s top literary honor. “The first thing I thought was: I have to buy a suit. I’m going to be introduced in parliament,” he said. “I live in Brooklin. I don’t have a suit. I finally bought one last week in Chicago.”

A few days earlier, Behrens had received an advance copy of the review published in yesterday’s New York Times book section. It was a rave. Surely the line “his writing is seamless, and often gorgeous” caught Behrens’ eye. But the accolade is not too different from notices in other papers. “Behrens illuminates one of the 19th century’s greatest tragedies and the massive migration it launched,” wrote The Washington Post. The Los Angeles Times called him “an unobtrusively elegant stylist.”

It’s that last description that might please him the most. “Dreams” took Behrens about 10 years to write, but the voice of his main character, Fergus O’Brien, came quickly and, despite interruptions to the writing schedule through the years, Fergus always seemed to be waiting for Behrens to tell the story.

“A book is a voice,” said Behrens, who is 52. “You don’t need anything else. But you need that voice. When I began this tale, I had no sense of how it would unfold plot-wise or dramatically. All I had was the voice. And I followed Fergus.”

The book opens with the potato blight forcing a farmer to evict peasants, including Fergus’ family, who have squatted on his land in County Clare for years. The cities are overflowing with paupers, prostitutes and profiteers, and those who don’t die from starvation are stricken with disease. It’s a bleak landscape out of which Fergus rises, scavenging his way through England and Canada to America.

Behrens, who loosely based the story on the life of his own great-great-grandfather, suggested that the book is only incidentally about history.

“I felt I wasn’t writing a book about Irish famine,” he said. “I was writing about sex and death and grief and various types of hunger and how the mind processes reality and transforms us. Of course, it’s also about the famine, but I’m not interested in teaching history.”

Yet the memory of Ireland’s famine is one that lingers as a cultural inheritance from his ancestors in Canada as well as his fellow Irishmen across the ocean. About 10 years ago, Behrens, who has also written short stories and screenplays, was in Dublin working on a story about the Troubles, the word used to describe turbulent times in Irish history. He awoke one morning to a radio broadcast about the famine in Ethiopia.

“That afternoon in Dublin there was someone on every street corner with a can collecting money for the famine in Ethiopia,” Behrens said. “I saw that famine was still a live wire in Ireland, and that awoke me to my own lurking fascination. The Irish have a gift for telling stories, but my experience was that the famine was a black hole of memory that lasted for two or three generations.”

While historians estimate that between 500,000 and one million people died in Ireland during the famine, Behrens’ Fergus is a survivor. “I think of him as a person who is like an animal, curled up inside himself,” said Behrens. “The voice in the book is his brain talking. He can hold himself within himself and get through. He has compassion, but he’s capable of a certain coldness, and that’s a survivor trait.”

Although Behrens is a frequent visitor to Canada – he and his wife, the jeweler Basha Burwell, and their 10-month-old son, Henry, are headed there to pick up his award this week – Maine has become the landscape of inspiration for him.

“The moment I got to Maine, I felt a sense of solitude,” said Behrens, who moved to Brooklin six years ago. “Even in its bleakest, slushiest days, it’s beautiful. I’m sounding romantic, but the beauty makes me feel grounded.”

Yet the “law of dreams,” as Fergus explains, is to keep moving, keep surviving. To that end, Behrens has started a second novel – about the descendants of Fergus O’Brien and Behrens’ own ancestors during World War II.

About the book: ?The Law of Dreams,? by Peter Behrens, Steerforth Press, Hanover, N.H., 2006