This is a book where everything springs alive from the page, so you need to take it slowly. Doing so gives the short atmospheric scenes time to marinate in the mind and adds an epic feel despite the novel’s brevity; the style, peppered with run-on sentences and hardly any commas, has a dash of Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis to it ... The fun of the romp recedes and the closing chapters offer a different, satisfying register in a minor key, a break from the pace but with new depth. It’s a risk, but that is what Barry’s writing is all about, after all. He has made it pay off before, and he does it again here.
Barry’s books are known for their stylistic brilliance, and The Heart in Winter is no exception. Terse and acrobatic, the novel effortlessly walks the line between goofy and gothic ... Barry has written us a love story that never seems false or cheap, and an adventure where the violence is never gloating or desensitised.
Barry is a master of loose talk and wild ideas ... Barry has written a vaudeville masterpiece, gaudy, ragged and irrepressible ... Barry’s sympathies are by turns comic and scarifying, the balance between which sets the novel’s tone at large ... Her worn quietude is the novel’s steady centre and the sign of what Barry’s scouring prose sometimes hides, which is the emotional range of his stories and his care for quiet in the chaos. For all its palpitations, The Heart in Winter has a persistent rhythm that is sign of a style to come, no matter how bitter the weather.
Rip-roaring ... The action is rendered in crisp and gritty prose, and the sensual descriptions of Tom and Polly’s lovemaking are gloriously over-the-top. The pleasure never lets up in Barry’s masterful novel.