For the Love of Willie

Peggy is turning a dark girlhood romance into a novel and is trying to get her fellow inmate at the mental hospital, known as the Duchess, to read the manuscript. Frankly the duchess would prefer a Mills and Boon, but her friend's wartime tragi-comedy soon gets a grip on her imagination.

For the Love of Willie is a compassionate look at wartime pregnancy and teenage predicaments through the eyes of Peggy, first as a shy sixteen year-old in love and later as an inmate in a psychiatric hospital.

Published to celebrate Agnes Owens' centenary year in 2026.



Agnes Owens was married twice and raised seven children, and worked as a cleaner, typist and factory worker. Her books include People Like That and For the Love of Willie, which was shortlisted for the 1998 Stakis Prize. Her short stories appeared alongside those of her friends and fellow authors James Kelman and Alasdair Gray in Lean Tales. Bad Attitudes, which consists of two novellas ('Bad Attitudes' and 'Jen's Party'), was longlisted for the 2003 Saltire Literary Awards. She died in 2014.

Heather Parry is a Glasgow-based writer and editor, originally from South Yorkshire. Her debut novel, Orpheus Builds a Girl, was shortlisted for the Saltire Society Fiction Book of the Year Award and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. She is also the author of a short story collection, This Is My Body, Given For You, and her first nonfiction book, Electric Dreams: On Sex Robots and the Failed Promises of Capitalism, was released in 2024 as part of 404 Ink's Inklings series.



'I cannot wait for a new generation of readers to re-discover the work of Agnes Owens'



'Agnes Owens is part of a Golden Age in Scottish literature'



'Agnes Owens' hallmarks have been a frank irony, a deadpan gothic quality and a down-to-earth insistence on the surreality of most people's normality'