Mpr News With Kerri Miller

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. 'The mind of Irish author' 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