“I always knew I had a horse opera in me.” A conversation with Kevin Barry is never dull and this one is off to a promising start. The ‘horse opera’ is his latest book, The Heart in Winter, a compelling and, as is to be expected, wonderfully written, tale of star-crossed lovers who go on the run in the Wild West in 1891.
The Limerick writer’s fourth novel is inspired by the Cork men who travelled to Butte, Montana, to work in the mines, mainly from the Beara Peninsula. And, like that particular geological feature, it took Barry a while to bring it all to the surface — 25 years, in fact. Chatting from his home in Sligo, he casts his mind back to Cork city in the summer of 1999, when he was working as a freelance journalist.
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