The novel begins with a stream of consciousness style of writing in the voice of Tom, the protagonist. The scene is a small town in the Old West, with hard drinking, fighting and swearing a plenty. Women, are in short supply and poor girls are shipped in to be married off in exchange for a secure roof over their heads. One such girl is Polly, who has been married off to a religious self flagellating copper mine owner and is unhappy. When Tom and Polly lock eyes, it's lust at first sight and so they steal $600 and go on the run with a posse of mad Cornish gunslingers in pursuit and all sorts of random, weird and wild occurings. The prose is very lush and won't be for everyone and it's all a bit "Deadwood." It's a short, enjoyable ride.

Wonderfully poignant book set in the frontiers of Montana and surrounds, as the winter moves in. I loved the writing style and found myself rooting for the rogues that are Tom and Polly. Beautifully descriptive of the landscape, with great humor thrown in for good measure. Only criticism is that I would have liked if it was a longer book - I flew through it and it ended too soon.

Elegiac tale of doomed love, like some ancient lay 3.5 raised to 4

I really love Irish writing, and this is definitely that, though set in America, in the 1890’s, in Montana, as it follows the travails of the Irish diaspora. Tom Rourke is a romantic young man, a poet, living in Butte, within a hard drinking Irish community. He is mainly always broke, earning what he can by writing love letters for men who are looking to find a bride. Unfortunately, what he earns is mostly spent on his drug and alcohol addiction, and occasionally in brothels.

Women are in pretty short supply, especially for men who want a wife and a family, and so there is a fairly flourishing trade in some kind of ‘mail order bride’, and perhaps women wanting security and with perhaps a past to hide might find needs met this way. One such is Polly Gillespie, who marries a dry as a stick mine management man.

When Polly and Tom set eyes on each other love hits them hard and will not be denied. They become fugitives, and head for California.

Featuring a wonderful cast of highly eccentric characters, some of whom help the couple, Polly, Tom and their stolen horse are pursued by a trio of equally eccentric killers.

This is hugely poetic, hugely sad, hugely operatic – and also weirdly funny., even within the violence. At times, the whimsy and opera of it felt a little overdone to me, on reflection, so that is reflected in my star rating. 3.5, raised to 4

As with all of Kevin Barry's writing, this novel packs a punch - sassy, cheeky and frantic, this will be revered by his fans as all his previous works. I was lucky enough to hear an interview with the author, which was also highly entertaining. I wasn't surprised to hear that this novel is in gestation for over twenty years, which explains the assuredness and confidence of the writing.

A must for Barry's fans


Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC

Well written and enjoyable, the characters in this were really interesting. I struggled a bit with the pacing and the plot as a whole however. I wish there was more in the plot itself but that characters made it worthwhile.

"The eggs went down controversially. The coffee began to straighten the affair. He rolled a smoke to find the hands were passable steady by this stage. Once more and gauntly he considered his situation. He wrote songs for the bars and letters for the lonesome. He was assistant to the photographer Lonegan Crane, a lunatic, of Leytonstone, East London, originally. His days had been passing with no weight to them but he knew now that fate would soon arrest him."

The Heart of Winter is Kevin Barry's fourth novel after

His memorable debut City of Bohane - a steam-punk graphic novel, but where the pictures were painted in words. This showcased Barry's Joycean love of the auditory power of language - with prose that almost demanded to be read out loud. The most memorable parts of the novel were the highly visual descriptions of the characters and the outlandish costumes that they wear (and which they change on a daily basis), although the plot itself took rather a back seat.

Beatlebone - which required rather more interest in John Lennon that I had, and I was unconvinced by the metafictional but rather artificial authorial intervention in the text

Night Boat to Tangier, a more contemporary and realist version of City of Bohane, although still trademark Barry - who has said "realist literary fiction is, of course, the hoariest (and dullest) of all the genres" - highlights including the Sexy Beast bickering between the two main gangsters Maurice and Charlie, and the simple but powerful backstory.

Barry himself described City of Bohane as "a weird retro-fitted future-Western, with lots of gratuitous swearing, hideous violence, perverse sex and powerful opiates", which rather overstated the gratuity/violence/sex, and The Heart in Winter is a more conventional Western, of the Celtic variety, sitting somewhere between City of Bohane and Night Boat to Tangier in style.

As always the prose is the main attraction - this description of two characters' and their clothes could be lifted straight from City of Bohane:

"The pair had a pretty natty mountain pirate air about them. Janeaux was wiry and compact like a strong prodigious boy and wore a small hooped gold earring in the left ear and had black, black eyes under a stovepipe hat tipped to a cheeky and defiant lean and long hair and boots of pointed toe and coloured rags for scarves tied about the neck and wrists. Some silver chains. Morasse stood skinny as a pipecleaner more than six feet tall and wore a pair of fine duck pants he was proud of and a fur hat out of the Quebecois reaches and long hair and much of a similar motley to his companion in terms of fanciful rag-scarves and a musical laugh that sounded like a flute of some rudimentary kind and was sounded often."

And this from a bar in the copper mining town of Butte, Montana ("The most Irish town in America" per the Irish Times), where the novel is set, in the late 19th century, amongst the Irish diaspora:

"Who would be the next to join them? A fine morningtime question to chew over in Butte at that hour of our desperate lives, and the Hibernian brethren bowed their heads to it sombrely. In sympathy with them Fat Con moved like a sweet old ma behind the counter. He cut off the sausage links and the strips of bacon and flung them with artistic expression to the grill. He cut white loaves on the slicer and chopped the liver into neat hanks with a murderer’s relish. He was a man in his time. He was alive to his place and task. He swung his great belly from grill to counter and back again and there was grace to it. Dankly his occult coffee simmered and there were canteen pots of tay stewed black as porter. Dead bloodshot eyes sat in a row for him along the high stools and every last set of them was beholden. He rendered the fats and toasted the breads. It was a pale November sky beyond on North Main Street and Con Sullivan cracked his eggs with princely flourishes. He was dainty about his work as a jewel-maker. An icy gust of the wind assaulted the room when some big fool eejit stepped in and left the door wide open for the North Main view.

Con Sullivan roared–Ah bang out the fucken thing wouldn’t ya and don’t have us slaughtered altogether!
It was Stephen Devane, the sheriff, who stepped back and closed the door gently.
Didn’t see it was yourself, Dev."

This is another great read, although for me not to the standard of Night Boat to Tangier, whose contemporary setting gave it more political resonance, and which gave the two main characters a more compelling backstory, here hinted at but dialled down for more on-page action. And I am perhaps suffering slightly dimishing returns from Barry's work - it would be great to see him do something very different next.

Thanks to the publisher via Netgalley for the ARC.

I loved the setting of the 1890's in Montana and the descriptive passages telling the story of Polly and Tom's love but I am not a fan of the writing style. It just didn't flow and I found it difficult to follow at times, although it was beautiful in some parts but just not enough to keep me interested due to the lack of detail. On the plus side, it does make me want to visit Montana, a place I have always yearned to see. Thanks to Net Galley for my ARC.

A novel by Kevin Barry is always an event on the literary and literary prize calendar.

His debut novel “City of Bohane” (which he described as a “weird retro-fitted future-Western with with lots of gratuitous swearing … and powerful opiates”) won the lucrative International Dublin Literary Award in 2013 (two years after publication); his second “Beatlebone” won the inaugural 2015 Goldsmiths Prize; his third “Night Boat to Tangiers” was Booker longlisted in 2019.

And this is his fourth novel.

It is a book a quarter of a century in the making – as his original research trip to the mountain town of Butte, Montana (where some thousands of County Cork copper miners emigrated in the last two decades of the nineteenth century) was in 1999 but he had never managed to coral the book – which he felt needed to have “an epic sweep, a broad canvas approach” into a manageable form – until deciding to simply make it a tale about two lovers – and is very much a Western, with plenty of swearing and opiates but not the futuristic retro of Bohane (but rather Butte itself in 1891).

I am also tempted to say it could be seen though as the third in a temporal trilogy about Irish origin drug dealers: Bohane (future), Tangiers (present) and now past.

And it is clearly in the tradition of Barry’s writing of beautiful sentences about far from beautiful people - one the excellent reviewer (and this year Republic of Consciousness Prize judge – Declan O’Driscoll summed up brilliantly in his review of “Night Boat to Tangiers”: "They scarcely deserve such descriptions, these callous people. It’s like giving a toilet brush a teak handle. Yet it is those remarkable passages of vivid and detailed writing that make this book worth reading. They appear with regularity and are always a delight, a reason to stop, to reread and savour the words in one’s mouth”.

And interestingly Barry has his opening protagonist Tom Rourke (part time photographer’s assistant, part time drug seller, part time songwriter as supplementing his income by writing letters for the “lonesome” to try and get them wives – and we are told of him "The halt and the lame, the mute and the hare-lipped, the wall-eyed men who heard voices in the night–they could all be brought up nicely enough against the white field of the page"

Rourke although only 29 opens the book already worried about his future fate – after seeing “a patent Irish stumble by …old and mad and forgotten on the mountain” ¬– plagued by existential crisis and in financial difficulties “He was in his own right a great scholar of debt.” – but his outlook is transformed when a local company captain visits the photo study with his new wife Polly (who has travelled over from Chicago).

Polly is rather alarmed when her otherwise unremarkable husband who she knew to be religious turns out to be a self-flagellating fanatic and so is vulnerable to Tom’s approaches and the two begin an affair.

The two then elope, with a Palamino horse Tom has befriended (although with limited riding ability –) and some money that Tom has stolen from a Boarding House which he then set fire to (to cover his theft). And while the official pursuit seems fairly desultory – Polly’s husband hires a Cornish giant of a bounty hunter and his two men to hunt the fugitives down and bring Polly back alive.

The rest of the short book tells the story of the escape, and the pursuit and its consequences.

As every with Barry the highlight of the book is his turns of phrase - and as the review of his earlier work suggests - there is much to savour and revisit here.

But I would also say that the characters are more sympathetic than in “Night Boat to Tangiers” and as a result I was invested in their fate and in their mental struggles with fate, providence, destiny and misfortune.

Overall, I would not be surprised to see this book too featuring on a prize list to continue the author’s run.

The novel starts in 1891. Butte, Montana. We meet Tom Rourke who uses drink and dope but also writes letters for the illiterate Irish miners who want to attract a bride from the East. All proceeds until Polly arrives as a newly married bride of Harrington.

She has a past and is settling for the good fortune of a house and a man for whom sex lasts two minutes when she meets Tom. Wham! Love! And it does feel like that.

They steal money and a horse and flee…. They are to be pursued by a gang of mad Cornishmen, with wild meetings along the way.

The novel opens with Tom’s stream of consciousness narration, so packed with the worst swear words that I almost stopped reading. I suppose these represent him and the hard West. The language is raw and challenging throughout. Yet you feel for the love story at the centre.

A review calls this a ‘rollicking ballad’ and another a ‘ glorious yarn’ and this has elements of both. A picaresque novel.

I received a copy from the publisher through NetGalley.

It’s 1891 in Butte, Montana, where our protagonists Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie’s first meeting takes place, a meeting that sees them inexplicably drawn together, even though Polly is married to someone else.

This small mining town of mainly Irish immigrants is a place full of vice and debauchery, and it’s where Polly has recently exchanged vows with devout Long Anthony Harrington, owner of a copper mine. Polly soon discovers that Harrington ties up his own wrists and whips himself into a frenzy over his love of Jesus. This is an arranged marriage and it’s clear from the start that this is not going to work for Polly. However, when she meets Tom Rourke, it’s as if all the planets align, and they need each other as much as they need to draw breath!

Tom and Polly leave town on a stolen horse and with $600 stolen cash. Headed west, they hope to leave Butte and Harrington far behind, but with a manhunt underway, consisting of a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen, every step takes them closer to danger, and that’s a price they may have to pay for their forbidden love.

“There she was with Tom Rourke hand in hand in terrible love in the dead of night and the forest deep looking up to the sky and all at once yessir absolutely they could see fires on the moon. Now that there’s a suretell sign, Ding Dong said, that it’s come to a time in your lives you need to act. And the dude Ding Dong, he spoke with this like weird authority”.

The prose used throughout is quite simply beautiful, leading to some vivid imagery of Montana’s harsh winters, while the well fleshed characters leap singing and dancing from the page. A poignant, funny and ultimately entertaining tale of the Old West.

Got a prerelease copy courtesy of NetGalley so thanks to them for allowing me to read this wonderful book.
At times funny, heartbreaking, romantic, scary, methodical, and then breakneck speeds. Often within the same chapter.

I have never read anything by Kevin Barry before, but some of the writing is out of this world, this early passage is a flavour of what you are in for should you choose to read this book.

"He wore a suit looked like it was made out of sheet metal and walked like a man with a pain he could tell you all about."

A lot of the time while reading this quite short story about 2 lovers trying to escape the clutches of her husband and the gang he'd sent after them, I found myself rereading the same passages 2 or 3 times because they were written so vividly.

I thoroughly recommend this book.

In tough, vice-ridden 1891 Butte, Montana we meet Tom, a young poet, frequent doper and writer of romantic letters for shy miners looking to woo women to the rough West.

Tom meets Polly, a newlywed he has helped woo for mine captain Anthony Harrington, and they instantly fall in love. Forced to flee, they set off on a stolen horse into the Montana winter and the novel follows their journey.

There’s a blend of the sentimental and beautiful with the violent and profane that makes this a really gripping and fast read. I sped through it in two days and would highly recommend.

Sublime reading experience created by a writer who is a master of his craft. A nuanced take on the Western genre peopled with memorable characters you do not want to leave behind.

Butte, Montana, 1891. When Tom Rourke lays eyes on Polly Gillespie, the new bride of the local mine manager, an irrevocable love affair is triggered. Both damaged people who have led difficult lives, they find something in each other that won’t be denied, and so steal money and a horse and run away together in search of freedom and happiness. But a trio of ruthless gunmen are on their trail and a bounty on their heads- can their luck hold? Beautifully written, this novel has an authentic and raw freshness about it. The harshness and hopelessness of life in Butte and the cast of crazed and debauched grotesques who roam through the pages are vivid and memorable, while the relationship between Tom and Polly is completely unsentimental yet portrays convincingly and movingly the depth and endurance of the love they find together. Simple yet profound, this is a love story that will not be easily forgotten.

The writing style of the book initially seemed complicated to me, but as I immersed myself in the story and focused, I found myself enjoying it. I think it's a well-elaborated book with a great character evolution and a very good storytelling process. It surpassed my initial expectations, and I believe it's a solid choice for fans of the author.

I just couldn’t get on with the writing style in this book - I wanted to like it, however, I really didn’t enjoy it, It felt like reading a long, rambling poem and somewhat distracted me from the story.

Firstly thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the advance copy of the book. This is my honest opinion.

Although the description from the back of the book sounded really interesting I found the style of writing hard to get into and I did struggle throughout . However the story in itself was good but I thought it all just seemed a bit rushed and the progression of the chase was too quick - I would have liked a little more tension . The descriptions of the towns were vivid and colourful and reminded me of the TV show Deadwood .

All in all an ok read for me .

A love story in Cowboy land.
Kevin Barry is an author who never uses two words when one will do, thus making his stories relatively short and easy to read.
As you would expect in a cowboy story there is a lot of violence, and a lot of fighting, in one way or another over a woman, who were, of course, in short supply.
A riveting tale easily read in a few sittings.
I loved it and am looking forward to Kevin's next book.
I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

The heart in winter by Kevin Barry.
Highly anticipated and I was highly honoured to get my hands on a review copy of Mr. Barry's latest!
A gorgeous love story with at last a Kevin Barry novel that has brilliant plotting and pacing. I adore his short fiction but only like his novel writing but this book is not only cleverly written in that very funny Kevin Barry turn of phrase but the chapter ends leave you hanging. It's very Country and Western but laced with irishness somehow!
Thank you to @doubledaybooks @penguinrandomhouse @netgalley for this review copy. Now the countdown is on as Kevin is reading at @writingandideas 2024! #kevinbarryauthor #rozzie

when i said i wanted to diverge from my normal reading patterns, this is exactly what i meant. this books is a riveting historical fiction with high tensions & cowboys (tom blyth i’m coming for your genre). with beautiful descriptions & a good use of language & accents to accentuate the time period, it explores discussions surrounding spirituality & fate in an interesting way. my mind also wandered towards the old idea of manifest destiny that was extremely prominent in america during this time, id love to know if this into consideration for barry. the book seems very experimental in his writing & although i haven’t read any of his other works, unfortunately it just didn’t fit right for me. although parts of the writing is gorgeous, shown in my post, other parts were hard to follow & sometimes felt a bit jarring due to the lack of punctuation & detail. this of course may be a style he’s experimenting with but it also doesn’t help in describing intimate scenes of women overall.there are also scenes of s*xual assault which i thought could have been treated better so please keep that in mind. i really liked the character of polly & how she managed her fearlessness & recklessness in her actions but she’s also the character i felt that i actually knew. overall, i felt that this was a story i appreciated more than i enjoyed but am pleased i was exposed to different styles.