The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry
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The Heart in Winter
Tom Rourke is a poet drowning in drink and opium on the copper-rich streets of Butte, Montana—a hard man in a hard town, heading nowhere fast. Then, on a windswept evening in October 1891, Polly Gillespie arrives as the new bride of the devout and self-flagellating mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A lightning-strike love affair ignites between them, and within moments, they're fleeing west on a stolen horse, carving out a brief and impossible idyll across the wild mountains of Montana and Idaho.
But their freedom is short-lived. A posse of deranged Cornish gunmen—hired by Harrington to bring Polly back—is closing in fast, and with every choice Tom and Polly make, the noose tightens. As winter deepens and their supplies dwindle, they race toward San Francisco and anonymity, knowing that the life they've imagined together may already be slipping through their fingers.
Kevin Barry's first novel set in America is a savagely funny, achingly romantic, and utterly propulsive tale of doomed love in the American West. Brimming with his trademark lyricism, dark humour, and an unforgettable cast of broken characters, The Heart in Winter is a love story for the ages—one that asks: what if you ride out and never look back? At 224 pages, it's a small book with an enormous heart, a masterclass in prose that fizzes and fizzles across the page.
Publisher: Canongate
Date Published: 24/04/2025
ISBN: 9781837260799
Number of pages: 224
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