
Review by Kirstin
The Heart in Winter
A gleefully delinquent Irish western
Butte, Montana, 1891, a magnet for Irish immigrants seeking their fortune at its famous copper mines. Here we meet Tom Rourke, tortured soul, ballad maker, and a man whose Hibernian eyes gleam with ‘the lyric poetry of an early death’. The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry depicts his electrifying love affair with the wife of a mine captain and their subsequent flight for freedom, in possession of purloined banknotes and pursued by vengeful hired gunmen. All hail a gleefully delinquent outlaw tale of wild hearts and hard lives, and the first Irish western I’ve ever read.