Tag: literary fiction

Book Review – The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry @canongatebooks

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About the Book

Book cover of The Heart in Winter by Kevin Barry

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 . . .

Format: Hardcover (224 pages) Publisher: Canongate
Publication date: 6th June 2024 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

I first saw mention of The Heart in Winter in the preview of upcoming books posted by Susan at A Life in Books so it’s thanks to her that not only have I been introduced to a brilliant book but also to a new author whose other work I will definitely explore. Truly this is a golden age for Irish writing.

To inhabit Butte, Montana in 1891 is to live in a place where violence and lawlessness is rife. Many immigrants have been drawn to the town – from Ireland, Cornwall, Wales and beyond – by the prospect of work in the area’s copper mines, or maybe even of striking it rich themselves. It’s a tough life and for many the only way to get through it is with alcohol or drugs supplied by Chinese traders, known as Celestials.

Tom Rourke is a drifter, drunk and opium addict who ekes out a living writing songs, love letters for illiterate miners hoping to attract a bride, and assisting in a photographic studio. It’s how he meets Polly Gillespie, the new bride of mine captain, Anthony Harrington. Polly has her own troubled past and soon discovers her new life as Harrington’s wife is going to bring neither happiness nor fulfilment. There’s a kind of tragic inevitability that Tom and Polly – both flawed, damaged individuals – will be drawn to each other. In fact, Tom has always himself believed he won’t make a good end – ‘What he reckons is you was born to a dark star’ – and has thought about hastening that end. Polly is a survivor, someone who can reinvent herself – and has done. She perhaps comes closest to being her true self with Tom.

In the hands of the author the landscape of 19th century Montana is simultaneously unforgiving but full of beauty. ‘Winter by now was truly the sour landlord of the forest.’ The characters leap off the page whether that’s the fanatically religious Harrington, punishing himself for his own lustful thoughts, or Jago Marrak, a giant of a man and the leader of the trio hired to track down the runaways. There are passages of wonderful prose such as in the chapter entitled ‘Nightmusic’.

‘About this time it became the common perception that trains sounded lonesome, especially in the hours of darkness, and you could not deny it looking across the yards at Pocatello Junction on that rainy December night as the Utah & Northern went out for Salt Lake City and left a long forlorn calling in its wake. The rain came slantwise and harder now across the sheds and the yards and the depot.. There was the distant roll of a piano line as it played in counterpoint to the night train’s fading call. There was some distant jeering also. The quartermoon climbed by slow degrees through the cloudbank to add to the night’s yearnful air and still the beating of the rain came down on the cars of the resting stock and somewhere in the town the jags of a woman’s screeching were cut short.’

The Heart in Winter is a enthralling, skilfully crafted combination of love story and adventure story. I was completely captivated by Tom and Polly’s story which, although you suspect is doomed from the start, you can’t help hoping will turn out differently. ‘…And wasn’t it a remarkable turn of events that showed love and death they co-exist in our violent and sentimental world. They might even depend one on the other.’

I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Canongate via NetGalley.

In three words: Moving, lyrical, immersive
Try something similar: Run to the Western Shore by Tim Leach

About the Author

Kevin Barry is the author of four novels and three story collections. His awards include the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and the Lannan Foundation Literary Award. His stories and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and elsewhere. His novel, Night Boat to Tangier, was an Irish number one bestseller, was longlisted for the Booker Prize and named one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by the New York Times. He also works as a playwright and screenwriter, and he lives in County Sligo, Ireland.

#BookReview North Woods by Daniel Mason @johnmurrays

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About the Book

FOUR CENTURIES. A SINGLE HOUSE DEEP IN THE WOODS OF NEW ENGLAND.

A young Puritan couple on the run. An English soldier with a fantastic vision. Inseparable twin sisters. A lovelorn painter and a lusty beetle. A desperate mother and her haunted son. A ruthless con man and a stalking panther. Buried secrets. Madness, dreams and hope.

All are connected. The dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

Format: eARC (384 pages) Publisher: John Murray Press
Publication date: 19th September 2023 Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction

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My Review

I loved the first book by Daniel Mason I read, The Winter Soldier, an emotional and beautifully written novel set in the First World War that I had no hesitation in awarding five stars. The same was true of his next book, A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth, a collection of short stories whose subtle links and recurring themes become more apparent as you read the book. In my review, I described it as ‘a tour de force of imagination’ and I have no hesitation in applying the same description to North Woods.

Starting in the 17th century and centred around a remote house and the surrounding north woods, events unfold in a series of episodes told in a variety of styles including a testimony, a newspaper report, a lecture, an exchange of correspondence, a poem, a song. Over time, the house is a place of passion, violence, refuge, contentment, simmering resentment, mental distress and trickery. It’s extended, damaged by storms, left to become derelict, abandoned and then rediscovered. The people that have inhabited it have each left a mark on it, sometimes incorporeal in nature, adding an intriguing supernatural element.

The connections the author weaves between the episodes and the various characters are immensely clever and skilfully done. Some of the links are obvious, some less so, meaning it might only be the mention of an object – an old hat of felted beaver – or a name – Osgood – that makes you recall an earlier story. The book is akin to a patchwork quilt made up of squares created by people of different generations and different skill levels, sewn together in random fashion but with some recurring motifs. As I was reading the book, my constant thought was ‘this is my favourite’, only for it to be replaced by another almost immediately afterwards.

The events in the lives of the characters are often intensely moving but there are also elements of humour, eccentricity and melodrama. And the book doesn’t just feature human characters but also animal and insect life – that ‘lusty beetle’ mentioned in the blurb – even fungal diseases.

The writing is beautiful with the author adopting a variety of styles that wonderfully bring to life the events of each episode. I’m a great fan of a list and there are some brilliantly quirky ones in the book, often almost poetic in style, such as this description of the items making up the ballast of a ship bound for America, demonstrating it’s not only humans who migrate.

‘There are stones and loam and sand, insects and earthworms, bird bones and crushed snail shells, roly-polies, and tuffs of grass that wilt within the darkness of the hold. There is a half-decayed mole, and a live one, broken jugs, a Roman coin that will be rediscovered by a young boy walking on the shoreline 317 years later, and another, a “crown of the double rose” bearing an image of Edward VI on horseback, that will sift down into the silty depths of Massachusetts Bay and disappear forever. There is a beaded necklace dropped by a longshoreman’s wife during a moment of indiscretion, a splintered lens from a bookkeeper’s spectacles, stray curls blown from the barber’s market stall by an offshore breeze, peach pits, rotting broadsheets of forgotten songs. And there are seeds, uncountable, scattered in the humid load: red clover, groundsel, spurrey, trefoil, meadow fescue, dandelion, hedge parsley, nonesuch, plantains.’

The depiction of nature is mesmerising charting the changing of the seasons and the transformation of the woods over time. In fact, the woods are a character in themselves acting amongst other things as a sanctuary, a meeting place, a source of inspiration, a habitation, a hiding place and a harbinger of environmental change.

I thought North Woods was absolutely brilliant. It’s definitely one of the best books I’ve read this year.

I received a digital review copy courtesy of John Murray Press via NetGalley.

In three words: Magical, imaginative, moving

About the Author

Daniel Mason is the author of The Piano Tuner (2002), A Far Country (2007), The Winter Soldier  (2018), A Registry of My Passage Upon the Earth (2020), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.  His work has been translated into 28 languages, adapted for opera and stage, and awarded a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, the California Book Award, the Northern California Book Award, and a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.  His short stories and essays have been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, a National Magazine Award, and an O. Henry Prize. He is an assistant professor in the Stanford University Department of Psychiatry. (Photo: Goodreads author page)

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