The Heart in Winter

Author(s): Kevin Barry

Historical Fiction | General Fiction for Dad

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.


Product Information

'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

General Fields

  • : 9781837262380
  • : Canongate Books
  • : Canongate Books
  • : 30 May 2024
  • : {"length"=>["21.4"], "width"=>["13.5"], "units"=>["Centimeters"]}
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Kevin Barry
  • : Paperback
  • : 224