THE SUNDAY TIMES HISTORICAL NOVEL OF THE YEAR
THE INSTANT IRISH TIMES BESTSELLER
PICKED AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, NEW STATESMAN, OBSERVER, IRISH TIMES, INDEPENDENT, IRISH INDEPENDENT, IRISH EXAMINER, TLS, SCOTSMAN, THE TIMES AND ECONOMIST

What if we ride out tonight?
What if we ride out and never once look back?

October, 1891. Butte, Montana. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city 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 balladmaker, 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 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. Briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunsmen are soon in hot pursuit of the lovers, and closing in fast . . .

Prizes

Winner of HWA Gold Crown 2025 (UK),Short-listed for Irish Book Awards Eason Novel of the Year 2024 (Ireland),Short-listed for Irish Book Awards The Last Word Listeners' Choice Award 2024 (Ireland),Short-listed for The Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction 2025 (UK)

An absolute belter of a book -- ANNE ENRIGHT
A dazzling tale of lovers on the run in Montana . . . Barry has written us a love story that never seems false or cheap, and an adventure where the violence is never gloating or desensitised. It's a wedding of Cormac McCarthy with Flann O'Brien; a western but also the most Irish of novels; a tragedy written as farce . . . inspiring joy with every incident, every concept, every sentence * * Guardian * *
Kevin Barry lights out for the territory and once again comes back with a shining nugget of gold. The Heart in Winter is a glorious and haunted yarn, with all the elements - the doomed lovers, the bounty hunters, the knife-fights and whisky-soaked songs - brought to mysterious life by the heft and polish of the Barry sentence. Marvellous -- JON McGREGOR
A violent, extravagant adventure set in 1890s Montana . . . [Barry's] thrilling best * * The Times * *
A great big rollicking ballad of a novel. A love story, and a slice of history, in a language as close to song as literature will ever get -- COLUM McCANN
An atmospheric tale of romantic runaways from an 1890s US mining town that has an epic feel . . . a book where everything springs alive -- JOHN SELF * * Observer * *
Holy damn, it's good. Includes (arguably) THE finest American frontier 'shroom scene in the Western canon -- DAVID MITCHELL
A glorious book with all the heart and excitement of a classic Western, couched in the mixture of lyrical style and offbeat comedy that has become Barry's trademark * * Daily Telegraph * *
Proof of the author's genius -- STUART KELLY * * Scotsman * *
[Barry] is constitutionally incapable of delivering a dull sentence -- MARTIN DOYLE * * Irish Times * *

Kevin Barry is the author of four novels and three story collections. His awards include the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. His novel, Night Boat to Tangier, was an Irish number one bestseller, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and named one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by the New York Times. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter, and he lives in County Sligo, Ireland.