The Heart in Winter

(Paperback, Country Special - ANZ Exclusive)

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Description

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...

Reviews

'Kevin Barry lights out for the territory and once again comes back with a shining nugget of gold. The Heart in Winter is a glorious and haunted yarn, with all the elements - the doomed lovers, the bounty hunters, the knife-fights and whisky-soaked songs - brought to mysterious life by the heft and polish of the Barry sentence. Marvellous' - JON McGREGOR

'Praise for Kevin Barry: Barry is a clairvoyant narrator of the male psyche and a consistent lyrical visionary' - Guardian


'One of the most abundantly talented novelists writing today' - Daily Telegraph


'If prose were gold and diamonds there'd be thousands of hell-bent prospectors heading for the Black Hills of Kevin Barry's glistening, sparkling novel' - SEBASTIAN BARRY


'Barry is such a deft and generous writer' - New York Times

Author Bio

Kevin Barry is the author of three novels and three short story collections. His awards include the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter, and he lives in County Sligo, Ireland.