The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry

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 ballad maker, 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 .

Paperback 
Publication: 24 Apr 2025, Canongate
ISBN: 9781837260799
Extent: 224 pages