It Is Always Summer is the last of the four Kingston novels that David Helwig produced in the closing decades of the last century in which, as one reviewer put it, he “transforms Kingston into an exotic Venice of the north.”(Matt Cohen) The narrative is as luxurious and disturbing as the lives reflected in it. This new edition has been revised by the author. “David Helwig has done that rare thing: written a novel about men and women that describes all characters in equal detail, sensitivity and depth in poetic, sensual language.” (Montreal Gazette.)

Betrayed by his oldest friend, a boyhood companion, his gingerly constructed career at stake, Clyde Bryanton, a property developer and Ottawa political consultant, unpeels layers and layers of memory, a half century of getting along by going along. Fatherless, his sire a casualty of the Dieppe raid, Clyde is as baffled by the emotions that occasionally sound from his depths as he is by his mentors, banker and the senator who manipulate money and power in a small Canadian city. A stranger even to his wife, who dubs him ‘Silent Joe,’ he navigates social, familial, political and commercial obligations with the same cool skills he exhibits on the golf courses that weave in and out of the fabric of his life. The darkest of secrets become no more to Clyde than the bunkers and sand traps he avoids with his selections of irons as he gambles a mysterious five thousand dollars against access to the wife of an envied son of privilege. This latest novel by distinguished Canadian author David Helwig, describes a North America, whether Canada or the United States, of eyes on the ground and noses to the grindstone, of business as politics and politics as business, of kindness and malice and nameless fear. Clyde, is an incisive portrait of the generation that came of age in the 1960s, and of the culture that came to dominate the second half of the twentieth century.