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It’s a winter night when we first meet Tom Rourke. He’s penning love letters, preening in mirrors, pushing dope, partaking of booze, singing and flirting and fighting. It's just another night in Butte, Montana, for the feckless young Irishman. And no one writes the Irish quite like Kevin Barry. 

Barry’s new novel, “The Heart in Winter,” is his first set in America. But true to form, it features the Irish. That’s because, in the 1890s, Irish immigrants by the thousands descended upon the tiny frontier town of Butte to work the copper mines — a historical nugget Barry learned in 1999. 

Kevin Barry lives in a hilariously malevolent world

As he told host Kerri Miller, at the time, he thought to himself: “My God, this is a Western but it's a Western with County Cork accents. I’m in. This is my book.” 

He immediately hopped on a plane to Montana, where he was welcomed warmly. Butte remains proud of its Irish heritage. And he went back to Ireland and wrote something like 100,000 words. 

But, he said, “I knew even as I was writing it, it was all dead on the page. It just wasn't coming to life for me, because I didn't have the characters yet. I didn’t have the people of the novel yet, and those took their sweet time. It took another 22 years and six books later before my characters finally appeared to me.”

What finally appeared on the page was a savagely funny and romantic tale of two young lovers on the run from a cuckolded husband’s goons. 

On this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, Barry joins Miller to talk about the entwined histories of America and Ireland and how he deftly uses comedy to combat a sense of fatalism. He also shares his experience narrating his own audiobooks, which he finds crucial for refining his stories. 

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Irish author Kevin Barry’s new novel, “The Heart in Winter,” was 22 years in the making. It was worth the wait. 

Novelist Kevin Barry writes an Irish western with ‘The Heart in Winter’

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