The Heart in Winter

A BEST BOOK OF 2024 FROM THE ECONOMIST AND THE MINNESOTA STAR TRIBUNE


“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
 
“A rare thing…This short, tight novel pulls one so swiftly along that it can be read in a summer’s afternoon. And then once more, slowly.” 
—Wall Street Journal

“Like its Montana setting, Kevin Barry’s novel is brutal and gorgeous… a sense of foreboding is shot through with dark humour.” 
—The Economist

“There will be gun battles and knife fights. The moon will rise above dark plateaus and dreams will reach as far as the Pacific coast…Of course in the hands of Kevin Barry it almost doesn’t matter. With language that is somehow both raw and lyrical, the real point is that we ride out to meet our fate.”
—The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“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

“A dazzling tale of lovers on the run in Montana . . . Barry has written us a love story that never seems false or cheap, and an adventure where the violence is never gloating or desensitised. It’s a wedding of Cormac McCarthy with Flann O’Brien; a western but also the most Irish of novels; a tragedy written as farce . . . inspiring joy with every incident, every concept, every sentence.”
— The Guardian

“All that should be required for you to saddle up and ride hard toward your nearest bookstore on July 9 is this: Kevin Barry does Deadwood…Barry never disappoints, but this one is a pure pleasure. A thrilling, tumescent, poetically vulgar, big-hearted romp of a novel…utterly electrifying.”
— LitHub

“It takes a sublime artist like Kevin Barry to map the wildest outposts of the human heart. He captures his poet bandit’s spirit through language that is consistently original, consistently exhilarating. ”
—Claire Kilroy

“An absolute belter of a book.”
—Anne Enright, author of The Gathering

“Rip-roaring…The pleasure never lets up in Barry’s masterful novel.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“The Irish writer’s humor and prose magic give the genre’s conventions a refreshing spin…Barry’s fans will be delighted and many a newbie beguiled.”
— Kirkus (starred review)
 
“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)
 
“Holy damn, it’s good.”
—David Mitchell, author of Cloud Atlas
 
“Barry’s sentences dazzle like lightning strikes yet he is equally gifted as a storyteller. Humorous, though ultimately profoundly moving, The Heart in Winter further confirms Barry’s place as one of our greatest contemporary writers.
–Ron Rash, author of Serena

“Another bloody brilliant little symphony from Kevin Barry”
—Max Porter, author of Grief is the Thing with Feathers
 
“I was spellbound…Funny, brutal, romantic and cinematic.”
—The Bookseller


“A sterling work of historical fiction and a picaresque love story that is brutal, hilarious, and fabulously entertaining.”
— Booklist (starred review)

‘Wondrous and bold. I’m in awe of Kevin Barry and endlessly inspired by his work’
—Lisa McInerney, author of The Rules of Revelation

“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
 
“A haunting, hypnotic love story of two damaged souls. Barry’s talent is breath-taking—he is a true original and, once again, words obey his call. This is a propulsive read from a writer at the height of his powers.”
— Mary Costello, author of Academy Street
 
“[B]y turns funny and tragic, full of typically outrageous figures and sublime writing.”
— The Observer
 
“Barry’s voice…propels us through [his] work, through paragraphs punctuated by turns of phrase that deliver little jolts of pleasure.”
— Francine Prose, author of A Changed Man