At Home and Abroad

Kevin Barry is the author of the novels Beatlebone, City of Bohane and Night Boat to Tangier and the story collections Dark Lies the Island, There Are Little Kingdoms and That Old Country Music. His latest novel The Heart in Winter is due to be published in June 2024. His awards include the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Prize, the Lannan Foundation Literary Award, as well as being longlisted for the Booker Prize 2019. His stories and essays appear in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter, and he lives in County Sligo, Ireland. October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana 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 ballad-maker 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 badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives. In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane, and propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.