The Heart in Winter: A Novel

"This is a wild love story set in a mining town in 1890s Montana. Tom Rourke, a degenerate hard-liver with a poetic imagination, falls for Polly Gillespie who arrives as the bride of the self-flagellating religious fanatic Captain Long Anthony Harrington. Tom and Polly are twin souls, living life to the full. It’s a stormy ride of a book. Kevin Barry can conjure up a street, a scene, a person, in a couple of words. The story he tells roars along like a Montana river in full spate. And there’s no shrinking. Barry follows his story with a twinkle in his eye, a gift for language and absolute, unblinking vigour. Plus, as David Mitchell observes on the cover of the hardback, The Heart in Winter includes—arguably—the finest American frontier magic mushroom scene in the Western canon."