★ 05/20/2024
This rip-roaring western from Barry (Night Boat to Tangier) chronicles the misadventures of an opium-smoking Irishman. The story begins in 1891 Butte, Mont., where reckless Tom Rourke senses “the approach of a dangerous fate.” He fancies himself a poet and balladeer, and to pay for his booze and dope, he writes letters to prospective brides on behalf of illiterate men. He also spends a lot of time admiring himself in saloon mirrors (“He wore the felt slouch hat at a wistful angle and the reefer jacket of mossgreen tweed and a black canvas shirt and in his eyes dimly gleaming the lyric poetry of an early grave and he was satisfied with the inspection”). After he meets Polly Gallagher, a mail-order bride from Chicago, the two trade lines of poetry and begin a passionate and chaotic affair. They burn down a boardinghouse, rob the safe, steal a horse, and head west across Montana to Idaho, with a posse in pursuit and tragedy in tow. The action is rendered in crisp and gritty prose, and the sensual descriptions of Tom and Polly’s lovemaking are gloriously over-the-top. The pleasure never lets up in Barry’s masterful novel. Agent: Lucy Luck, C&W. (July)
NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE LA TIMES, THE GUARDIAN, THE NEW STATESMAN, THE IRISH TIMES, THE JOURNAL, AND THE OBSERVER
“Exhilarating...What starts as a gritty depiction of one man going nowhere soon becomes a gripping tale of two lovers on the run...Both an Irish-flavored western fraught with danger and brutality and a love story filled with caustic humor and pathos....Barry’s signature touches predominate and render the narrative propulsive and immersive.”
—The Washington Post
“A rare thing…This short, tight novel pulls one so swiftly along that it can be read in a summer’s afternoon. And then once more, slowly.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Like its Montana setting, Kevin Barry’s novel is brutal and gorgeous... a sense of foreboding is shot through with dark humour.”
—The Economist
“There will be gun battles and knife fights. The moon will rise above dark plateaus and dreams will reach as far as the Pacific coast…Of course in the hands of Kevin Barry it almost doesn’t matter. With language that is somehow both raw and lyrical, the real point is that we ride out to meet our fate.”
—The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“A dazzling tale of lovers on the run in Montana . . .A wedding of Cormac McCarthy with Flann O’Brien . . . inspiring joy with every incident, every concept, every sentence.”
—The Guardian
"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."
— The Guardian
"All that should be required for you to saddle up and ride hard toward your nearest bookstore on July 9 is this: Kevin Barry does Deadwood...Barry never disappoints, but this one is a pure pleasure. A thrilling, tumescent, poetically vulgar, big-hearted romp of a novel…utterly electrifying."
— LitHub
"It takes a sublime artist like Kevin Barry to map the wildest outposts of the human heart. He captures his poet bandit's spirit through language that is consistently original, consistently exhilarating. "
—Claire Kilroy
"An absolute belter of a book."
—Anne Enright, author of The Gathering
"Rip-roaring...The pleasure never lets up in Barry’s masterful novel."
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“The Irish writer’s humor and prose magic give the genre’s conventions a refreshing spin…Barry’s fans will be delighted and many a newbie beguiled.”
— Kirkus (starred review)
“Rollicking … Barry’s style seems magnificently effortless as Tom and Polly meet some strange and curious characters on their travels, and it seems Barry can make anything compelling. A sterling work of historical fiction and a picaresque love story that is brutal, hilarious, and fabulously entertaining.”
— Booklist (starred review)
“Holy damn, it’s good.”
—David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
“Barry’s sentences dazzle like lightning strikes yet he is equally gifted as a storyteller. Humorous, though ultimately profoundly moving, The Heart in Winter further confirms Barry’s place as one of our greatest contemporary writers.
–Ron Rash, author of Serena
“Another bloody brilliant little symphony from Kevin Barry”
—Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers
“I was spellbound…Funny, brutal, romantic and cinematic.”
—The Bookseller
"A sterling work of historical fiction and a picaresque love story that is brutal, hilarious, and fabulously entertaining."
— Booklist (starred review)
‘Wondrous and bold. I'm in awe of Kevin Barry and endlessly inspired by his work’
—Lisa McInerney, author of The Rules of Revelation
"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. Marvelous."
— Jon McGregor, author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
"A haunting, hypnotic love story of two damaged souls. Barry's talent is breath-taking—he is a true original and, once again, words obey his call. This is a propulsive read from a writer at the height of his powers."
— Mary Costello, author of Academy Street
“[B]y turns funny and tragic, full of typically outrageous figures and sublime writing.”
— The Observer
“Barry’s voice…propels us through [his] work, through paragraphs punctuated by turns of phrase that deliver little jolts of pleasure.”
— Francine Prose, author of A Changed Man
★ 06/01/2024
Award-winning Barry's (City of Bohane) newest, a genre-blending novel with romance and adventure to spare, is set in 1890s Montana, where Tom Rourke, a feckless young Irishman, earns a sketchy living working as a photographer's assistant, selling dope, and writing letters of proposal to prospective brides on behalf of illiterate miners. One such bride is Polly Gillespie from Chicago, who has passed herself off as younger and fresher than she really is in the hopes of a brighter future in Butte. The reality is much less promising when she finds that she has married a self-flagellating religious man. When the new couple arrive at Tom's photography studio for their wedding portrait, there is an immediate attraction between Tom and Polly. In short order, they light out for parts west with a stolen horse and money pilfered from Tom's landlady. But with their poor sense of direction, harsh winter weather and a bounty on their heads, elopers' future does not look auspicious. VERDICT Barry writes like a charm; every sentence sparkles.—Barbara Love
Kevin Barry narrates his dark story about a whirlwind romance between an opium addict and a mail-order bride in the winter of 1891 in Montana. This story--resplendent with esoteric language and a quirky style--is surely best consumed in audiobook form, and Barry's narration does it justice. Tom Rourke long ago abandoned the miserable work in the copper mines in favor of spinning ballads in an opium haze. Polly Gillespie arrives in town as a mail-order bride for another man and immediately begins a passionate affair with Rourke. Barry narrates Rourke's wildly fervent visions of life with Polly and his encounters with mystical life-forms when the pair steal a horse and head west in the dead of winter. N.M.C. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine
★ 2024-05-04
Would-be outlaws, tough dames, large gunmen, and lousy lovers commingle in this heady yarn.
The restless Barry mind has carried readers from a hellscape of Celtic gangbangers (City of Bohane, 2012) to John Lennon visiting an island he owned (Beatlebone, 2015) to most recently a pair of bantering ex-drug dealers in a Spanish ferry terminal (Night Boat to Tangier, 2019). Here he’s gone West, to Butte, Montana, in 1891. Tom Rourke has been drifting between bars and brothels and opium dens and dreaming of “being the outlaw type” when he falls hard for Polly Gillespie. She’s just arrived from the East and is newly married to gruff mining boss Anthony Harrington, who preps for his wedding night with self-flagellation and crazy prayer. She and Tom soon light out for San Francisco after stealing cash and a horse and plotting a vague route to the train station in Pocatello, Idaho. Not far behind them are Harrington’s hired pursuers, led by a Cornish gunman seven feet tall and half as wide. At bottom, the novel offers fairly standard fare for a Wild West tale, but the Irish writer’s humor and prose magic give the genre’s conventions a refreshing spin. He recalls Flann O’Brien’s mock-heroic flair in At Swim-Two-Birds and the phrase-weaving and less extreme moments of weirdness in William Kotzwinkle’s The Fan Man and Barry Hannah’s The Tennis Handsome. A dissipated photographer has “the look about him now of dying poultry.” For a man with a hangover, his “noggin end was a tower of screeching bats” and “his stomach was a failing metropolis.” A stranger met on the road “wore a heap of weather and a troutbrown corduroy longcoat.”
Barry’s fans will be delighted and many a newbie beguiled.
