King years

Heather Robinson has made Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King's bizarre and paradoxical psyche the mainspring of a historical novel of consummate invention, audacity and wit. Set against the turbulent background of World War I and Canada's struggle to achieve political maturity, "Willie: A Romance" hurls Mackenzie King into not only a love affair but a love triangle. A unique and absorbing panorama of wartime Canada and wartime Ottawa, official and unofficial, the novel is richly peopled with historical characters: King, Talbot Papineau, Sir Wilifrid and Lady Laurier, Lord Beaverbrook, John D. Rockefller Jr., among others. Sympathetic and fascinating, "Willie: A Romance" delves deeply into the secret life of Mackenzie King, exposing an extraordinary mixture of buffoonery and cunning, paranoia and ambition, puritanism and prurience.