Canongate Books
Kevin Barry | The Heart In Winter - Signed Edition
9781837262571
06/06/24
HB
215 pages
SIGNED EDITION
A savagely funny, achingly beautiful tale set in the Wild West, from the Booker-longlisted author of Night Boat to Tangier
A GUARDIAN BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024
A NEW STATESMAN FICTION HIGLIGHT OF 2024
AN OBSERVER FICTION TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024
AN IRISH TIMES FICTION TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024
‘An absolute belter of a book’ ANNE ENRIGHT
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 …
“A violent, extravagant adventure set in 1890s Montana … [Barry’s] thrilling best”
The Times
“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 … has a dash of Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis”
JOHN SELF
Observer
“Holy damn, it’s good. Includes (arguably) THE finest American frontier ‘shroom scene in the Western canon”
DAVID MITCHELL
“An absolute belter of a book”
ANNE ENRIGHT