Canongate scoops first novel in five years from Night Boat to Tangier author Barry

Canongate has scooped Kevin Barry’s new novel, The Heart in Winter, his first since the Booker-longlisted Night Boat to Tangier (Canongate). 

Publisher at large Francis Bickmore acquired UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada, from Lucy Luck at C&W Agency. North American rights were acquired by Lee Boudreaux at Doubleday, who will be publishing alongside Canongate in summer 2024.

The book is set in the autumn of 1891 in Butte, Montana, in a city "rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers". It tells the story of young poet and balladmaker Tom Rourke, who is "also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate". 

The synopsis said: "Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely 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, and 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." 

Barry is the author of three other novels and three short 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. 

He said: “I wrote the first draft of this novel after visiting Butte in 1999, so it’s been a long time in the works, and I’m delighted to have finally hit what feels like the right note for it. And it’s a great thrill to continue my relationship with Canongate and all the gang there – it’s always felt like a very natural home for my books.”

Bickmore added: "Kevin Barry’s latest novel is a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale set among the immigrant communities of the Wild West in the 1880s. Musical as hell, pacy and bent as a convict’s conscience, it has echoes of Bonnie and Clyde, Badlands and Deadwood. But at heart, it is a work of pure Barry genius and one that takes his career to a whole new level."