The Heart in Winter

THE IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER

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The Heart in Winter

By: Kevin Barry

Narrated by: Kevin Barry

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THE SUNDAY TIMES HISTORICAL NOVEL OF THE YEAR
THE INSTANT IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER
PICKED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, NEW STATESMAN, OBSERVER, IRISH TIMES, INDEPENDENT, IRISH INDEPENDENT, IRISH EXAMINER, TLS, SCOTSMAN, THE TIMES AND ECONOMIST

What if we ride out tonight?
What if we ride out and never once look back?

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 . . .

Kevin BarryKevin BarryCanongate Books

Genre Fiction

Historical Fiction

World Literature

Heartfelt

Scary

Tear-jerking

Thought-Provoking

Montana

Genre Fiction Historical Fiction World Literature Heartfelt Scary Tear-jerking Thought-Provoking Montana

Critic reviews

"An absolute belter of a book" (ANNE ENRIGHT)

"A dazzling tale of lovers on the run in Montana . . . Barry has written us a love story that never seems false or cheap, and an adventure where the violence is never gloating or desensitised. It’s a wedding of Cormac McCarthy with Flann O’Brien; a western but also the most Irish of novels; a tragedy written as farce . . . inspiring joy with every incident, every concept, every sentence"

"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 violent, extravagant adventure set in 1890s Montana . . . [Barry's] thrilling best"

"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)

"An atmospheric tale of romantic runaways from an 1890s US mining town that has an epic feel . . . a book where everything springs alive" (JOHN SELF)

"Holy damn, it's good. Includes (arguably) THE finest American frontier 'shroom scene in the Western canon" (DAVID MITCHELL)

"A glorious book with all the heart and excitement of a classic Western, couched in the mixture of lyrical style and offbeat comedy that has become Barry’s trademark"

"Proof of the author’s genius" (STUART KELLY)

"[Barry] is constitutionally incapable of delivering a dull sentence" (MARTIN DOYLE)

Most relevant

Mr Barry will drag you ( effin drag you) into a world not so long past and not so far away, a love story a story of hope . no plot giveaway s from me but ....Wonderful yarn of
the old very wild west. The authors narration is outstanding.