Irish lovers on the run in America’s wild frontier: Kevin Barry’s tale of romance, vengeance and adventure

A quarter of century in the making, the novelist’s magnum opus is a story of violence and contradictions; opportunity versus risk, love versus revenge

Kevin Barry with the backdrop of the mining town of Butte in Montana, which was popular with Irish emigrants

Róisín Lanigan

Kevin Barry has spent most of his life travelling. By the time the author was 36, he had managed to gather 17 different addresses, leaving his native Limerick to live in Cork, Santa Barbara, Barcelona and Liverpool before settling down in a ramshackle former RUC barracks in Sligo.

But then, what is more quintessentially Irish than the urge to flee, except perhaps the urge to return? This contradiction at the heart of our diaspora is so ubiquitous that it has become a stereotype: the Irish boomerang, so goes the saying, doesn’t come back when it’s thrown, but it never stops singing songs about how it wishes it could.