The Heart in Winter (Unabridged‪)‬

A GUARDIAN BOOK TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024
A NEW STATESMAN FICTION HIGLIGHT OF 2024
AN OBSERVER FICTION TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024
AN IRISH TIMES FICTION TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2024

What if we ride out tonight?
What if we ride out and never once look back?

October,
1891. Butte, Montana. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky
Mountains. The city 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 balladmaker, 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 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.
Briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of
deranged Cornish gunsmen are soon in hot pursuit of the lovers, and
closing in fast . . .