The Heart in Winter

February 1, 2024

Barry's debut novel won the Dublin Literary Prize and his third, Night Boat to Tangier, is being adapted for film. His latest is set in the 1890s in a Montana mining town, where immigrant Irish worker Tom falls for the wrong woman; the young lovers run away together with a posse of gunmen in hot pursuit. Prepub Alert.

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Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 15, 2024
Irishman's Barry's (That Old Country Music, 2021) first novel set in the U.S. is a rollicking western that takes place in 1890s Butte, Montana, a town full of Irish immigrants working the the copper mines. Tom Rourke is a poet but better known in Butte as a morphine addict and drinker struggling to get by. His life is transformed when he meets Polly Gillespie, who regrets her recent marriage to the devoutly self-flagellating mine director. The two fall in love and flee, hoping to make a life for themselves far from Butte, even dreaming of reaching San Francisco, while desperately avoiding the horsemen hired to catch them. While reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy when focusing on the brutality of the American West, Barry also evokes Frank Norris' brutal naturalism in the contrast between the Old West and modernity. The on-the-lam lovers are similar to those in Barry Gifford's Wild at Heart: The Story of Sailor and Lula (1990). Barry's style seems magnificently effortless as Tom and Polly meet some strange and curious characters on their travels, and it seems Barry can make anything compelling. A sterling work of historical fiction and a picaresque love story that is brutal, hilarious, and fabulously entertaining.

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Starred review from May 20, 2024
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.

Starred review from June 1, 2024
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.

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Starred review from June 1, 2024

Award-winning Barry's (City of Bohane) newest, a genre-blending novel with romance and adventure to spare, is set in 1890s Montana, where Tom Rourke, a feckless young Irishman, earns a sketchy living working as a photographer's assistant, selling dope, and writing letters of proposal to prospective brides on behalf of illiterate miners. One such bride is Polly Gillespie from Chicago, who has passed herself off as younger and fresher than she really is in the hopes of a brighter future in Butte. The reality is much less promising when she finds that she has married a self-flagellating religious man. When the new couple arrive at Tom's photography studio for their wedding portrait, there is an immediate attraction between Tom and Polly. In short order, they light out for parts west with a stolen horse and money pilfered from Tom's landlady. But with their poor sense of direction, harsh winter weather and a bounty on their heads, elopers' future does not look auspicious. VERDICT Barry writes like a charm; every sentence sparkles.--Barbara Love

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