I DNFed this book. I think the writing was beautiful and the story had potential, but I found myself bored. Possible that I wasn’t in the right mindset to read such a book at that time. I do plan to come back to it at some point and give it a second try!

I really liked the description of this book when I requested it, I have not read this author before
Sadly I did not like it, did not enjoy the writing style. I kept thinking it would get better. The story and characters did nothing for me unfortunately

While this is a smaller novel, page count wise, it's large in prose and scope as a love story.
How can you lose when you put the wilds of Montana, the 1800's, love on the run and the best of written language!
Those elements come together in a story of love and a chase across the miles. Tom and Polly are on a crash course for disaster but with love at the heart of it all.

This book was a very happy surprise for me! I’m usually a reader of contemporary romance, and contemporary romance only, but something about this book called to me, and from the very first chapter I could tell that I would love this!

The writing was equally poetic as it was easy to grasp and so descriptive, the setting was perfect, the pacing of the story was perfectly executed and the characters were hard to not root for! There was also a touch of humor throughout the story that felt so unique to this author, it was one of my favorite things about the writing in this book!

This is a true master class of a novel!

If you devoured The Luminaries, or are a fan of Patrick DeWitt's The Sisters Brothers, you might just like The Heart In Winter by Kevin Barry.

Barry, an Irish author known for his Irish settings (you know I've a soft spot for those reads), ventured away from his norm and took a dive into the American frontier with a tragic love story set in 1890s Wild West town of Butte, Montana (interestingly, a place known for its large Irish population).

The story follows Tom Rourke, an Irish photographer’s assistant battling addiction, and Polly, a young woman already bored with her newly arranged marriage to a self-flagellating (someone who whips themselves for religious reasons - I had to look that up!) owner of a copper mine. Their instant connection leads them to steal a horse and cash, fleeing west while being pursued by gunmen. 

The writing style might not suit everyone, but I loved it. Barry perfectly caputures the essense of the characters, the time, the place, the tragedy and the reality.

It’s also reignited my interest in Western-themed reads—Lonesome Dove might be next on my list!

4.5 ⭐️

A big thanks to @penguinrandomca for the #gifted copy in exchange for my honest thoughts.

This is a very good story, rather short, but I found the characters to be developed very well and the world they live in really came to life. 1891, Butte MT, Tom Rourke, an Irish immigrant, in a small town seemingly full of them, works when he needs to and otherwise engages in satisfying his addiction to dope, which he does a lot. That is until Polly strolls into town and marries Long Anthony Harrington, she had been exchanging letters with him, not always truthful, and she agreed to come out and marry him. While the couple are having their portrait taken, someplace that Tom occasionally works at, Tom sets eyes on Polly and instantly falls in love. Only problem is she's married, to a mine owner and someone who is love with Jesus more than anything, and expresses that love by performing flagellation on his back, repeatedly. Tom and Polly decide that they should leave Butte and head to San Francisco where they can live happily. They steal a horse, money and set off, though not long after Long Anthony sets a man after them to return his bride, this man and two associates set off to track them down. Tom and Polly are not prepared for winter in the mountains, they are not dressed for it and their horse can only carry both for short distances. Eventually the man searching for them finds them and that's when things take a turn. A heartbreaking story but very enjoyable. If you enjoy reading about star crossed lovers you would enjoy this, I would recommend. Thanks to #Netgalley and #Doubleday for the ARC.

I was a fan of Night Boat to Tangiers so thought I’d enjoy this one, but I only liked it and didn’t love it. The writing is beautiful! It just didn’t grab me for whatever reason,

There are so many glowing reviews about the lyrical writing and how beautiful this book was but I just could not get into it. I just couldn't get into the rhythm and the dialects, it required too much concentration and I wasn't able to immerse myself unfortunately.

I'm an admirer of Kevin Barry's work, especially some of the short stories and "Night Boat to Tangier." And I like a good literary western whether humorous or solemn, from 'Lonesome Dove' to 'Butcher's Crossing.' But I couldn't get through this one. A shame, because it's a great idea. For one thing there wasn't the necessary suspension of disbelief--it felt like Barry playacting to me. The love story at the heart of it held little interest for me. The major influence felt more "Deadwood" than Cormac McCarthy. But I'll continue to pick up anything that Kevin Barry writes and give it a try.

I’m really not sure how to write a review for this book. Although the prose was lyrical I found the off colour language annoying. I’m no prude but I’m guessing it was just the part character John Rourke played. There were a few times I almost stopped reading the book but I persevered. The book and characters jumped around and I found it hard to follow. Many reviews were very favourable so I’m in the minority with mine.

I haven’t read any of Kevin Barry’s previous books and perhaps they’re different/better than this one.

Not recommended by me but take a chance and YOU might be pleasantly surprised?

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Books for my eARC copy.

It's an interesting storyline, however, I wasn't a huge fan of the style of writing. The lack of almost all punctuation took me a bit to get used to. It just made the telling so blunt, which to me is the fair opposite of lyrical, as the story is so often described. I kept reading, as I did want to find out how Tom and Polly's story ended, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. Although it's clearly just not for me, many others adored it.
3.5 stars

Irish writer Barry sets this story in 1891 Montana, among the struggling Irish denizens of a frontier town, in which two young(ish) people fall passionately in love and run away together during one of the bitterest winters anyone can remember. The problem is, the young woman is a mail-order bride who has only just been married to a deeply repressed God-botherer, and there’s also the matter of a stolen horse and a torched boarding house left in their wake. The spurned husband sets a trio of terrible hunters on their trail, and the story of love and vengeance is well and truly launched. As ever with Barry’s writing, this story is defined by his distinctive, idiosyncratic, almost Biblical prose

Absolutely brilliant! This is by far the best new novel of the summer. I cannot wait to get this into the hands of people!

Thank you to Netgalley for an ARC and Libro.fm for an ALC. I ended up listening to the audiobook because it was so well done.

I haven't read something like this in a while. It was a bit like a raunchy Bonnie and Clyde set in the late 1800s. Tough to explain, but the characters really leapt from the page and some of the language was quite beautiful.

As posted to GoodReads

DNF. I don’t love the writing style. It’s “poetic”, kind of abstract, and hard to follow. Add in that there are no quotation marks for dialogue; it just feels like work to read this. It’s crude which I also don’t love. I have never heard of the author before. I’m sure some will love the writing style. It’s artsy. But this was not for me.

I encountered this author via an earlier novel, Night Boat to Tangier (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/2019/12/review-of-night-boat-to-tangier-by.html), which I enjoyed, so I thought I’d read his latest release.

This book begins in October of 1891 in Butte, Montana. Tom Rourke, addicted to a life of alcohol, opium, and debauchery, meets Polly Gillespie who has just arrived and been married to a mine captain. It’s love at first sight for Tom, and Polly quickly succumbs to his roguish charm. Soon the two head west with stolen money and a stolen horse, their escape resulting in a pursuit by hired hit men.

This is, at least in part, a love story. It’s a forbidden love but one Tom and Polly believe is their fate, giving them no choice but to fall in love. Priding himself on being something of a clairvoyant, Tom “senses the approach of a dangerous fate” just before he first meets Polly. I found myself hoping that theirs was not a star-crossed love and that they would be given a chance to be together because, though surrounded by danger and violence, there is no doubt of the tenderness and passion that exists between them. When a situation arises that puts Polly in danger, Tom risks his life, feeling “He had never had a task so sharply defined in his life before, never this weight of purpose, not this fury of intent.”

The book excels at depicting the lives of immigrants working in the silver and copper mines: “they worked until death the pits.” They came to the Promised Land but “Those who had been dispossessed would forever remain so – this was the golden promise of the Republic.” One immigrant says, “In a country like this . . . all they give you is fairy tales. . . . They’ll tell you that you can be happy. That it’s your right and destiny. . . . Now that’s a bunch of horseshit.”

One of the book’s messages is that survival may mean forgetting the past. We learn little about Tom and Polly’s lives before their arrival in Butte. Even with each other they are circumspect: Tom “said little of the time before he came to Butte or where he had come from” and “She was blurry about the details of things” and both sense they should not press for more information. Looking back may result in being “eaten whole and alive by the past” so it’s best to avoid falling “into the drag of the past like the drag of a river because it is so powerful it can take you down.” And of course one’s memories cannot always be trusted: “the past it shifts around all the time. The past is not fixed and it is not certain . . . The past it changes all the while every minute you’re still breathing and how in fuck are you supposed to make sense of it all.”

Westerns are not my genres of choice, but this one is worth reading for the language alone. There is an energy to Barry’s unrestrained language that jumps off the page. Here’s a description of the effects of drinking tequila: “They were neither of them used to Mexican drinking but intrigued by it all the same – its sweet congress and carnival air – despite the trepanation-like skull pain the colourless spirit had the pronounced tendency to leave in it wake.” A winter morning comes up “corpse-grey and ominous. Winter by now was truly the sour landlord of the forest.” The vivid imagery continues: “the stumps of ancient trees showed like broken teeth” and “a dank hallow that felt like an alcove for the laying out of the dead” and “the funereal odour of juniper as in a church incense.” There are also run-on sentences that lack commas and some stream-of-consciousness passages: “in a shotgun shack somewhere in the Idaho Territory getting fed up like a vealcalf by a toothlackin Cornish gunsman of extreme mental dubiety and the wind is pickin up outside and offerin its slow yearnsome tales – go sell ‘em somewhere else, fucker, I’m stocked – and you’re waitin on your sworn lover.” There’s more than tongue-in-cheek humour in the reference to “writing men with a penchant for the high style.”

There is a lot of humour. We’re introduced to Tom as he is engaged in writing matrimonial proposals for “wretched cases . . . The halt and the lame, the mute and the hare-lipped, the wall-eyed men who heard voices in the night – they could all be brought up nicely enough against the white field of a page. Discretion, imagination and the careful edit were all that was required.” Then there are the various characters that Tom and Polly encounter during their travels, among the first being two Métis men enjoying hallucinogenic mushrooms and a man of the cloth imbibing large amounts of tequila.

The book reminded me of The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt, but I enjoyed this one much more. Its memorable characters, humour, vivid imagery, and poetic language make for an engrossing, entertaining read. There’s reference to a newspaper article entitled, “The Twelve Rules of Writing Western Adventures” which Tom studies “in grave and scholastic silence” before commenting sourly “There’s fucken twelve of ‘em?” If such rules exist, Kevin Barry has mastered them all.

I did not enjoy the writing style of this book and did not finish it. I know others will love it, it just was not for me.

The heart in winter is a western romance set in late 1800s Montana. Tommy Rourke is a mess of a man when he first lays eyes on Polly Gillespie. She is newly, and unhappily, married but they are drawn together in a whirlwind romance.

There are some fantastic elements of this one that I was drawn to - being set in Montana on this time period gave me Yellowstone vibes that I couldn’t wait to dive into! The romance between Tom and Polly was believable and sweet but I struggled with the writing. It was a challenge to get into, while it was interesting I wasn’t driven to pick it up. I found the dialogue disengaging, amidst some beautiful descriptions left me wanting more.

A story with great bones, and definitely a worthwhile read!

Thank you to NetGalley for my copy in exchange for an honest review

Come sit by the fire and let me tell you the story of Tom Rourke and Polly Gillespie, two of the many immigrants in Butte, Montana at the end of the nineteenth century. Tom works for the local photographer but has the soul of a poet and spends a lot of time ghost writing letters for other men in the town. Polly is the newly arrived bride of an older, taciturn mine captain. Tom and Polly, of course, find each other.

Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter is described aptly ad an Irish Western love story and it brought to mind the few other brushes with westerns that I’ve had (Lonesome Dove, The Ridgerunner, the tv show Deadwood). Oddly, though it’s not a genre I seek out, I’ve loved the three I just mentioned and The Heart in Wonter is a worthy addition.

Part of what made this enjoyable was the way Barry navigated shifting points of view. Though written in third person narration, Barry subtly (and then not so subtly) shifts the language and syntax to reflect which character’s POV we’re following at the time. You don’t realize it at first as the story begins with Rourke and he’s a literary-ish kind of guy, but when you get to Polly who’s had an unspecified but likely rougher beginning when she was out east, it becomes clear. Her “voice” was my favourite. One warning, though, is that in inhabiting the POVs, Barry does use what we’d now see as inappropriate terms and views of Indigenous and other races. It’s done fairly briefly which I suspect is Barry navigating the conundrum of being time-period accurate with contemporary understandings, but it’s worth noting for readers who’d prefer their books to run entirely clear of such things.

A short book focused on this one story, The Heart in Winter is a zippy read. At the end, though, Barry left me contemplating. In its denouement, the book jumps ahead in time reminding us of the monumental cultural, technological shifts that happened between the 1890s and the mid-1900s and I appreciated him showing us how this story exists at such a juncture in history. An enjoyable summer read, for sure.

⭐️ 1.5 /5

Note, this book has a lot of good reviews so it’s likely I’m not the right audience so definitely check this out if you like 𝙬𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙣𝙨, 𝙄𝙧𝙞𝙨𝙝 𝙬𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜, 𝙝𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙛𝙞𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣, 𝙡𝙤𝙫𝙚 𝙤𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙧𝙪𝙣 and you might have a better reading experience :)

“The Heart In Winter”, set in 1891, offers a unique experience but I found it challenging in several ways. The determination and devotion of the main characters to each other stood out. I also appreciated MMC, Tom’s made up songs that added lightness to my reading experience. However, the writing style was different from what I’m used to and it was hard to follow. It was sadly hard to get into. The story jumps from one scene to another without clear transitions, which left me often confused. FMC, Polly’s POV was easier to read. The lack of quotations around the dialogue made it difficult to discern when exchanges began and ended. It did become interesting and more engaging near the end and I started to care for the main characters so it was unfortunate that the ending was unsatisfactory.

Overall, it’s a quick read. While I was initially intrigued by the western romance and historical aspect of the book, the writing style and structural challenges made it a tough read; and the ending was disappointing.

Thank you Netgalley and Penguin Random House Canada for this advanced reader’s copy. This is my honest review..