The Heart In Winter

Gabi's Review

Kevin Barry's latest work The Heart in Winter is a lyrical, profane, and propulsive love story demonstrating an absolute mastery of style while being a poetic exploration of the human heart. The novel is harsh and hilarious, brilliantly crafted and beautifully bookended with a mirror vision. It has elements of Samuel Beckett and Cormac McCarthy, and I rate it as one of the best novels of 2024.

In the autumn of 1891, as a harsh winter looms over the Rocky Mountains, Butte, Montana is bustling with lucrative copper mines and a wild, reckless atmosphere fueled by the hard-living immigrant Irish workers. Tom Rourke, a charming would-be poet, is additionally a dope fiend, not cut out for mine work, eking out a living writing professional letters and as a photographer’s assistant. Pretty, sharp Polly Gillespie, escaping a dark past, is newly wed to the piously dull mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. Polly quickly intuits her lacklustre future with Harrington and on impulse, engages romantically with Tom. Impelled by their fiery passion, they escape on a stolen horse, journeying through the untamed lands of Montana to seek a new and free life in San Francisco. These ill-fated star-crossed lovers race towards safety, but the repercussions of their choices chase them and haunt them forever.

You never float above Kevin Barry's books: they land you directly into the sludge and mud! I loved the novel's language with its humorous lyrical phrases, quotable descriptions and two unforgettably charming, flawed main characters. If you are in the mood for a fool’s errand adventure and a touching if morally sordid love story, this new novel from a wonderful Irish writer won’t disappoint.

Publishers Reviews 

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.