Historical Fiction: July 26 - Beer and Book Club

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This month's choice is The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry.

Barry’s books are known for their stylistic brilliance, and The Heart in Winter is no exception.

The hero of Kevin Barry’s novel, The Heart in Winter, is a dope-fiend Irishman haphazardly subsisting in the mining town of Butte, Montana, in the 1890s.

As the book begins, Tom has two fateful meetings, both involving love at first sight. The first is with a palomino horse, “a nervous animal, of golden aura”, which he stumbles upon while coming down from opium at 4am.

The second encounter is with Polly Gillespie, a newly arrived mail-order bride who walks into his photography studio with her God-obsessed stick of a husband, Long Anthony Harrington.

Their rocky pasts have taught them nothing except that the future is probably no gift either. They are hapless and shiftless and in no way special, and you totally get why they adore each other.

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.