Kevin Barry | The Heart in Winter
Recorded: Thu 24 Apr 2025
Duration: 1 hr
Kevin Barry | The Heart in Winter
Spring 2025
Acclaimed author Kevin Barry returns with The Heart in Winter, his first novel since the Booker-longlisted Night Boat to Tangier. Set in 1891 Butte, Montana, a booming town built on copper and fuelled by vice, whiskey, and hard-living Irish immigrants, this is a dazzling tale of love, betrayal, and pursuit in the American West.
At its heart is Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad maker—but also a drinker and a degenerate. Just as his life seems destined for ruin, he meets Polly Gillespie, the newly arrived wife of the devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A lightning-strike romance ignites between them, and soon they flee westward on a stolen horse, carving out a brief, untamed idyll in the badlands of Montana and Idaho. But their escape is short-lived: a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen is closing in fast.
Join us as Kevin Barry brings his trademark lyricism, dark humour, and wild storytelling to this epic tale of doomed love, frontier violence, and the dream of freedom.
In conversation with Tom Gatti
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