Cover image for The heart in winter : a novel
The heart in winter : a novel
Title:
The heart in winter : a novel
Author:
Barry, Kevin, 1969- author.
ISBN:
9780385550598
Personal Author:
Edition:
First American edition.
Physical Description:
243 pages ; 20 cm
General Note:
"Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Canongate Books Ltd., London, in 2024."
Abstract:
"A love story about outlaws in a community of Irish workers in Montana"-- Provided by publisher.

October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana 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 of the town, 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 extremely 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, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.