A witty, satirical romance set in the fictional colonial kingdom of Oneiria, where King Kophetua XIII sits on a throne that has become a gilded cage. Once founded on Renaissance ideals, the kingdom has drifted into comfortable stagnation, no wars to fight, no injustices to correct, no purpose to give a monarch's life meaning. Kophetua is a king starving for something real, someone to challenge him. Enter Mademoiselle de Tricotrin, an enigmatic figure who disrupts his carefully ordered world of political apathy. Corbett, writing with sharp wit and genuine emotional depth, crafts a meditation on duty, desire, and the hollow crown of peace. This is a book about what happens when a ruler has everything except the one thing he craves: a cause worth dying for. For readers who enjoy Swift's satirical edge tempered with romantic longing, or who wonder what a Renaissance idealist king might feel centuries later, adrift in bourgeois contentment.
