The Heart in Winter - Kevin Barry
A Reading and Conversation with the Author
in partnership with Politics & Prose Bookstore
When: Wednesday, July 10, 2024 at 7:00pm
Where: Politics & Prose Bookstore (5015 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20008)
Price: This event is free with first-come, first-serve seating.
Award-winning writer Kevin Barry’s first novel set in America, a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana.
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.
Copies of The Heart in Winter will be available for purchase on site during the event.
KEVIN BARRY is the author of the novels Night Boat to Tangier, Beatlebone, and City of Bohane as well as three story collections including That Old Country Music. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter lives in County Sligo, Ireland.
