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The Heart in Winter
- Length: 5 hrs and 15 mins
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The Heart in Winter
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Summary
A NEW STATESMAN FICTION HIGLIGHT OF 2024
A GUARDIAN BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024
October, 1891. Butte, Montana. 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, 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 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 badlands of Montana and Idaho. 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...
The Heart in Winter is a savagely funny, achingly beautiful tale set in the Wild West.
Critic 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)
'A great big rollicking ballad of a novel. A love story, and a slice of history, in a language as close to song as literature will ever get.' (COLUM McCANN)
'A haunting, hypnotic love story of two damaged souls. Barry's talent is breath-taking - he is a true original and, once again, words obey his call. This is a propulsive read from a writer at the height of his powers.' (MARY COSTELLO)