Author(s): Kevin Barry

General Fiction

Butte, Montana, October 1891, and a hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers.

Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and balladmaker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington.

A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the bad-lands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunsmen are soon in hot pursuit of the lovers, and closing in fast..

A savagely funny, achingly beautiful tale set in the Wild West, from the award-winning author of Night Boat to Tangier.

MATILDA BOOKSHOP REVIEW

This is a totally wild novel. Wild in nature, tone, setting and language, The Heart in Winter is a vivid psychedelic Western tracing the steps of Tom O'Rourke's journeys, both literal and emotional, across hardscrabble America in the late nineteenth century. Barry's voice throughout is unique, earthy and unfettered, as he  portrays a landscape and lifestyle alien to our contemporary eyes while describing a vision of doomed Irish romanticism that still holds sway today. It's funny and moving and I loved every single moment of it. GAVIN