It Took 22 Years for Kevin Barry to Unlock His First U.S.-Set Novel

What books are on your night stand?

I’m neck-deep in Willy Vlautin’s new novel, “The Horse,” and it’s just as good as all his other books. I just finished Caleb Azumah Nelson’s “Small Worlds,” a beguiling take on first love in Peckham and the spiritual release of dancing. I also recently dug Sheila Heti’s “Alphabetical Diaries,” an artful cut-up of her journals, and Vinson Cunningham’s elegant “Great Expectations.”

Describe your ideal reading experience.

Probably a filthy winter’s night at home in County Sligo, in the bed, with the rain rattling the windows and the wind shaking the four corners of the house, and a fire in the grate, and I’m probably rereading something old and beloved and slightly eccentric like a Jean Rhys or a V.S. Pritchett or an Iris Murdoch.

Why did you decide to set “The Heart in Winter” in America?

In the summer of 1999, I was walking in the mountains in West Cork in Ireland when I came across some abandoned copper mines. I learned that they’d played out in the 1880s and all the miners had left for Butte, Mont. I thought, This is a western, but with County Cork accents — I’m in.

Did you spend time in Montana before writing?

Indeed. In October 1999, I took a 14-hour Greyhound trip from Seattle to Butte and I had a blast out there. Butte is very proud of its Irish heritage and the welcome laid on for a native son was elaborate. I got great material for a novel, all lovely, ripe stuff about the bars and brothels and opium parlors of the 1890s, and I read the long-gone miners’ lonesome letters in search of brides, and much more. I went back to Ireland and wrote 120,000 words and it was all dead on the page. Walking through the woods in County Sligo one day, 22 years later, the book’s true characters suddenly appeared to me, Tom and Polly, a pair of runaway lovers, and I finally had my Butte novel. Writing fiction is a slow game sometimes.

Do you write to music? What were you listening to while working on the book?

I do: I try to influence the writing, to score it. For “The Heart in Winter,” I listened to heartsore ballads by the Irish tenor Count John McCormack, lots of old polkas and reels, the “Badlands” soundtrack, country love songs by Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Tom Waits doing “Somewhere.” I was an emotional basket case from it all, up to my eyes in old romance, which was exactly where I needed to be.

What book should everybody read before the age of 21?

“Finnegans Wake,” by James Joyce. The more freethinking and malleable you are going into it, the better, and so openhearted youth may be the ideal condition. It might also knock any nonsense about books needing plots out of young readers’ minds.