Stealing money, setting fire to a hotel, and riding off into the sunset with another man's wife. The things we do for love.

The headstrong hero of brilliant Irish writer Kevin Barry's first novel, set in the US, is Thomas Rourke, who at 29 is “half a genius” and “a great debt expert”. While he vows to abstain from drugs, alcohol and prostitutes, the opening scene finds Rourke indulging in all three and getting immoderately drunk. Just reading the novel can cause a hangover. In the morning, Rourke looks as if he had been “controlled by an inept puppeteer”.

Or is it another invisible hand that guides Rourke? Fate? Love? An Irish temperament that makes him “deadly sad”?

In 1891, after leaving behind “scary days” and “bad nights” in Ireland, Rourke finds himself in Butte, “the black heart of Montana,” a bustling town of immigrants, railroads, copper mines, and pollution. As a side job, the would-be writer writes love letters for lonely men seeking mates in the expanding American West.

One of these mail-order brides, Polly Gillespie, shows up at the photo studio where Rourke works as an assistant. She is newly married to a rich, religious mining boss. The spark between the two “love crooks” ignites a plan to flee to San Francisco together on a single horse.

Their journey is a cold-weather picaresque novel, replete with psychedelic mushrooms and a kindhearted but murderous backwoods priest. The descriptions are lyrical: “They rode through the blue, starlit realm of winter. Against them flowed the river Pontneuf in nighttime silver.” Warmth and contentment briefly reach an abandoned cabin in the woods, where the new couple find their version of marital bliss.

Here, as in his previous novels and stories, Barry's imaginative prose is a delight sentence by sentence, like a twist-and-turn alpine hike or a row of shot glasses of Irish whiskey on a polished bar. His sense of how certain types of people converse is uncanny.

While Tom and Polly may not be as memorable as the Beckett-esque middle-aged gangsters Maurice and Charlie in Barry's Night Boat to Tangier, they are by turns cheerful, brooding, idealistic and fatalistic.

When bounty hunters injure Tom and tie up Polly, we learn more about her rough past. She believes she's in “one of those nightmarish situations that only evil can offer, and it's not like she hasn't been through a few of them.”

After they are separated by violence, Tom sets out again, determined to save his wife in distress. And: “If death prevented them from seeing her again in this life, then that was how it was meant to be.”

More of a chamber western than a John Ford epic, The Heart in Winter is bursting with great (and wonderfully named) supporting characters. It's a heartbreaking love story.

Claude Peck is a former columnist and editor at the Star Tribune.

The heart in winter

From: Kevin Barry.

Editor: Doubleday, 256 pages, $28.

Event: In conversation with Julie Schumacher, July 11, 7 p.m., Magers & Quinn, 3038 Hennepin Av., Mpls. Admission is free, but reservations are recommended.