The Heart In Winter

THE SUNDAY TIMES HISTORICAL NOVEL OF THE YEAR

He was ready to die for love. He just needed to find the right girl.

Lindsay's Review

I thoroughly enjoyed this book as a total change from my usual reading fare. Although I haven’t read Kevin Barry’s previous works, I’m glad I gave this Irish Times Bestseller a go. The grittiness of Irish writers has always been appealing, and this one cakes the dirt to your shoes. It’s set in a mid-West Californian town in the grips of the 1800s mining boom, at a time everyone came from somewhere else but America. The main character Tom Rourke is a would-be wordsmith and aspiring poet who saves himself from the mines by writing commissioned letters and dealing opium. He staggers through the muddy streets of the ramshackle town in an oblivious intoxicated delirium. Haunted by the voices of spirits, he is set apart from the others and declines the company of his Irish kinsmen.  

Heeding the call of a destiny he has been expecting, he falls head over heels in love with a newlywed woman from Chicago.  They both give in to their soul connection and elope to escape their elicit pasts in the hope of starting a bright new life in California. However, the deeds that fund their romantic dash set the bounty hunters on their trail. The devoted love of the forlorn pair drives the pathos and eventual tragedy of the story. Written in a rapid-fire colloquial style that throws grammar out the window, the book sweeps us along in its descriptions of a freezing landscape and the story of a developing love.  

I found The Heart in Winter to be a masculine version of romance, full of misapplied dedication, obsessive emotion and deadly loyalty in which Tom plays the ultimate White Knight. Although the book has a Wild West framework, it’s fundamentally a celebration of the universal drive of love. There are no heroes, simply tawdry villains and suffering common folk. Nobody is rich, and everyone is spiritually impoverished. In this garden of weeds blooms a small flower of love and hope, soon mercilessly crushed. Wonderfully composed, from the first paragraph to the last, we stagger and reel along with lost characters in a stark, bawdy, and thoroughly convincing world which presents love in all its rawness. A Western Romance with a difference, and thoroughly worth the read. 

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 

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
AN i-PAPER AND SUNDAY TIMES BOOK TO READ THIS SUMMER

'An absolute belter of a book' ANNE ENRIGHT

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.