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A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK: THE LA TIMES, THE GUARDIAN, AND MORE! • Award-winning writer Kevin Barry’s first novel set in America, a savagely funny & achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana.

"A wedding of Cormac McCarthy with Flann O’Brien; a western but also the most Irish of novels; a tragedy written as farce . . . inspiring joy with every incident, every concept, every sentence."— The Guardian

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October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice & debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet & ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, & a fearsome degenerate. 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 & Polly & 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 gunmen are soon in hot pursuit & closing in fast. With everything to lose & the safety & anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane & propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, & a true poet of the human heart.

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KEVIN BARRY is the author of the novels Night Boat to Tangier, Beatlebone, and City of Bohane as well as three story collections including That Old Country Music. He also works as a playwright & screenwriter. His stories & essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, & elsewhere.