Book Of The Month November 2024

Quizlit’s Book of the Month November 2024 is the rip-roaring The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry. Set in the American West of the 1890s, it tracks the dangerously forbidden affair between a torrid young balladeer and the wife of a devout and powerful mine captain.

Book of the Month November 2024

The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry

Butte, Montana, October 1891, and 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 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 bad-lands of Montana and Idaho, and 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.

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“A dazzling tale of lovers on the run in Montana . . .A wedding of Cormac McCarthy with Flann O’Brien . . . inspiring joy with every incident, every concept, every sentence.”
—The Guardian

“Rollicking … 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.”
— Booklist (starred review)

“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. Marvelous.”
— Jon McGregor, author of If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things

“Exhilarating…What starts as a gritty depiction of one man going nowhere soon becomes a gripping tale of two lovers on the run…Both an Irish-flavored western fraught with danger and brutality and a love story filled with caustic humor and pathos….Barry’s signature touches predominate and render the narrative propulsive and immersive.”
—The Washington Post