Award-winning writer Kevin Barry's first novel set in America, a savagely funny and achingly romantic tale of young lovers on the lam in 1890s Montana.

October 1891. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains. The city of Butte, Montana is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and ballad-maker of the town, but also a doper, a drinker, and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the extremely devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington. A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho, and briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunmen are soon in hot pursuit and closing in fast. With everything to lose and the safety and anonymity of San Francisco still a distant speck on their horizon, the choices they make will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

In this love story for the ages—lyrical, profane, and propulsive—Kevin Barry has once again demonstrated himself to be a master stylist, an unrivalled humourist, and a true poet of the human heart.

Book One: Sporadic Memories is a novel about a lifestyle that needs to be read about. Within the first few pages, you will realize there has been a loss. It is not sad, though; the narrator expresses with great enthusiasm the life they lived, which makes it nice during the times when it becomes difficult to read.

By the first few pages, I hope you can hear the narrator has been alive for a long time, explaining the way it is written. There is no distinction between the characters’ genders, which offers a personal experience for the reader. The part that remembers the time they gave bracelets to each other brings about another way of joining together in marriage … following how their courtship developed, and the apple tree that is depicted throughout the novel using its fruit in traditional family recipes.

It gets sad for a bit after this, but notice that it gets sad because there is so much more to why the one lost is worth writing about. It is partly a love story. You know for sure it is when you get to the parts about the piano played and songs written … you should at first read to the first song. The memory at the exhibition and recalling times in the rain and snow are next.

They traveled a lot together and you will read of a place if you read a little past the description of the surroundings of their home. If you read to the first birthday mentioned; you will find a recipe worth trying, a poem worth reading, and fireworks. The narrator is a playwright, so there is a play that is broken down throughout the novel … it is a difficult read, but it is important in showing how the two brought their work together, and what positive influences they made upon those they met.

Things are repeated to show how important positive repetition is, which helps to move past pain while remembering the passion. This novel is full of passion, carried throughout the life they had for each other, their work, and their friends … you might want to read through first until you hear about their friends. This novel completes the story as the pages turn; putting certain pages together will bring the memories in order. It is an easy read. It is written poetically, which gives it justice. It begins the way it ends …

It was an icy morning in January 1945 when the patrol came for seventeen-year-old Leo Auberg to deport him to a camp in the Soviet Union. Leo would spend the next five years in a coke processing plant, shoveling coal, lugging bricks, mixing mortar, and battling the relentless calculus of hunger that governed the labor colony: one shovel load of coal is worth one gram of bread.

In her novel, Nobel laureate Herta Müller calls upon her unique combination of poetic intensity and dispassionate precision to conjure the distorted world of the labor camp in all its physical and moral absurdity. She has given Leo the language to express the inexpressible, as hunger sharpens his senses into an acuity that is both hallucinatory and profound.

In scene after disorienting scene, the most ordinary objects accrue tender poignancy as they acquire new purpose—a gramophone box serves as a suitcase, a handkerchief becomes a talisman, an enormous piece of casing pipe functions as a lovers' trysting place. The heart is reduced to a pump, the breath mechanized to the rhythm of a swinging shovel, and coal, sand, and snow have a will of their own.

Hunger becomes an insatiable angel who haunts the camp day and night, but also a bare-knuckled sparring partner, delivering blows that keep Leo feeling the rawest connection to life. Müller has distilled Leo's struggle into words of breathtaking intensity that take us on a journey far beyond the Gulag and into the depths of one man's soul.

From the winner of the Michael L. Printz Award and the Carnegie Medal, this book is a work of astonishing intimacy and depth. Using a pillow book as her form, nineteen-year-old Cordelia Kenn sets out to write her life for her unborn daughter. What emerges is a portrait of an extraordinary girl, who writes frankly of love, sex, poetry, nature, faith, and of herself in the world.

Her thoughts range widely: on Shakespeare and breasts, periods and piano playing, friendship and trees, consciousness and sleep, and much more besides. As she writes of William Blacklin, the boy she chooses as her first lover, or Julie, the teacher who encourages her spiritual life, Cordelia maddens, fascinates, and ultimately seduces the reader. This is a character never to be forgotten from a writer at the height of his powers.

Nightwood, Djuna Barnes' strange and sinuous tour de force, belongs to that small class of books that somehow reflect a time or an epoch. That time is the period between the two World Wars, and Barnes' novel unfolds in the decadent shadows of Europe's great cities: Paris, Berlin, and Vienna—a world in which the boundaries of class, religion, and sexuality are bold but surprisingly porous.

The outsized characters who inhabit this world are some of the most memorable in all of fiction. There is Guido Volkbein, the Wandering Jew and son of a self-proclaimed baron; Robin Vote, the American expatriate who marries him and then engages in a series of affairs, first with Nora Flood and then with Jenny Petherbridge, driving all of her lovers to distraction with her passion for wandering alone in the night; and there is Dr. Matthew-Mighty-Grain-of-Salt-Dante-O'Connor, a transvestite and ostensible gynecologist, whose digressive speeches brim with fury, keen insights, and surprising allusions.

Barnes' depiction of these characters and their relationships has made the novel a landmark of feminist and lesbian literature. Most striking of all is Barnes' unparalleled stylistic innovation, which led T. S. Eliot to proclaim the book so good a novel that only sensibilities trained on poetry can wholly appreciate it.

Now with a new preface by Jeanette Winterson, Nightwood still crackles with the same electric charge it had on its first publication in 1936.