The heart in winter A novel

This rip-roaring western from Barry (Night Boat to Tangier) chronicles the misadventures of an opium-smoking Irishman. The story begins in 1891 Butte, Mont., where reckless Tom Rourke senses "the approach of a dangerous fate." He fancies himself a poet and balladeer, and to pay for his booze and dope, he writes letters to prospective brides on behalf of illiterate men. He also spends a lot of time admiring himself in saloon mirrors ("He wore the felt slouch hat at a wistful angle and the reefer jacket of mossgreen tweed and a black canvas shirt and in his eyes dimly gleaming the lyric poetry of an early grave and he was satisfied with the inspection"). After he meets Polly Gallagher, a mail-order bride from Chicago, the two trade lines of poetry and begin a passionate and chaotic affair. They burn down a boardinghouse, rob the safe, steal a horse, and head west across Montana to Idaho, with a posse in pursuit and tragedy in tow. The action is rendered in crisp and gritty prose, and the sensual descriptions of Tom and Polly's lovemaking are gloriously over-the-top. The pleasure never lets up in Barry's masterful novel. Agent: Lucy Luck, C&W. (July)

Barry's (Night Boat to Tangier) gravelly audiobook narration amplifies his gritty Western set in 1891 Butte, MT, during the copper-mining heyday. Tom Rourke, an Irishman with a morphine and alcohol habit, encounters Polly Gillespie, an Irish mail-order bride from Chicago, on the day she is posing for her marriage portrait with her new husband, a mining captain. Unable to clear Polly from his thoughts, Tom delivers her wedding photos to her home and continues to find reasons to return after that. While Polly's husband works, Polly and Tom share stolen moments together, and love blooms--along with a plan to run. After stealing money and a horse, the ill-fated lovers flee Butte for San Francisco to begin their life anew. Along their westward trek, they fight vicious cold and snow and encounter unique characters such as a fiddle-playing, mushroom-ingesting Métis couple and a garrulous English reverend who's overly fond of tequila. Unbeknownst to them, however, Polly's woebegone husband hires a band of outlaws to hunt down the lovers and return his wife to Butte. VERDICT Barry's husky narration, in the manner of an Irish Batman, is fresh and well suited for this exceptional story of forbidden love set against a brutal Montana landscape. Fans of Cormac McCarthy will particularly relish it.--Kym Goering

Would-be outlaws, tough dames, large gunmen, and lousy lovers commingle in this heady yarn. The restless Barry mind has carried readers from a hellscape of Celtic gangbangers (City of Bohane, 2012) to John Lennon visiting an island he owned (Beatlebone, 2015) to most recently a pair of bantering ex-drug dealers in a Spanish ferry terminal (Night Boat to Tangier, 2019). Here he's gone West, to Butte, Montana, in 1891. Tom Rourke has been drifting between bars and brothels and opium dens and dreaming of "being the outlaw type" when he falls hard for Polly Gillespie. She's just arrived from the East and is newly married to gruff mining boss Anthony Harrington, who preps for his wedding night with self-flagellation and crazy prayer. She and Tom soon light out for San Francisco after stealing cash and a horse and plotting a vague route to the train station in Pocatello, Idaho. Not far behind them are Harrington's hired pursuers, led by a Cornish gunman seven feet tall and half as wide. At bottom, the novel offers fairly standard fare for a Wild West tale, but the Irish writer's humor and prose magic give the genre's conventions a refreshing spin. He recalls Flann O'Brien's mock-heroic flair in At Swim-Two-Birds and the phrase-weaving and less extreme moments of weirdness in William Kotzwinkle's The Fan Man and Barry Hannah's The Tennis Handsome. A dissipated photographer has "the look about him now of dying poultry." For a man with a hangover, his "noggin end was a tower of screeching bats" and "his stomach was a failing metropolis." A stranger met on the road "wore a heap of weather and a troutbrown corduroy longcoat." Barry's fans will be delighted and many a newbie beguiled. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.