A wild ride Tragedy and farce collide in the Irish author's beautiful, lovable and fun tale of lovers on the run in 19th-century Montana

The hero of Kevin Barry's new novel, The Heart in Winter, is a dope-fiend Irishman haphazardly subsisting in the mining town of Butte, Montana, in the 1890s. Tom Rourke has a poor excuse for a job as assistant to a poor excuse for a photographer, and earns drink money by writing letters for illiterate men luring brides from the east. His spare time is spent haunting brothels, racking up debt through his opium habit, and writing songs along the lines of: Ain't got a dime / But the sun's gonna shine/ Coz we's all bound for heaven/ On the Cal-i-fornee line. In his own mind, he is "set apart from the hoarse and laughing crowd. He was at a distance of artistic remove from it was what he felt."

- Sandra Newman

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. He's no horseman, and yet the animal calls to him as if from some foredoomed future: "The horse stilled herself utterly and fixed the lashes of the long stare on his and he was bound."

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. As her picture is taken, the tip of her nose twitches, her eyes meet Tom's, and "his heart turned". From Polly's point of view: "That boy was looking at her so hard it was like he just discover eyes... and suddenly everything was chilly and there was a real weight to it." Before long, Tom and Polly have taken the palomino and are lighting out for San Francisco with a saddlepack full of stolen money. "And there she was with Tom Rourke hand in hand in terrible love in the dead of night and the forest deep looking up to the sky and all at once yessir absolutely they could see fires on the moon."