A Domestic Animal

A tragicomic novel of unrequited love by "one of the finest and most remarkable of English novelists of our time." (The Scotsman)
Antonio Valli, a gifted Italian philosopher in his thirties, has left his wife and children behind in Florence for a one-year research fellowship at a provincial English university. Handsome and charming, Antonio is irresistible to men and women both; something he knows how to use to his advantage, even if he professes to be resolutely heterosexual. One who falls helplessly under his spell is Dick Thompson, the successful middle-aged novelist in whose house Antonio rents a room. For the first time in fourteen years, Dick finds himself desperately, passionately in love, but the games the manipulative, ruthless Italian plays with him, throws the older man's previously calm, ordered life into chaos, and sees him spiralling into a morass of covetousness, frustration and despair.
Published only three years after the decriminalization of homosexuality in the UK and based on the author's own obsession with a younger, unobtainable man, A Domestic Animal is Francis King's most intimately and daringly autobiographical novel. It's also "one of the best things he ever did" (D. J. Taylor, Times Literary Supplement): a "wry, anguished study . . . of love and jealousy [that] is hard to forget" (Robert Baldick, Daily Telegraph).

Francis King (1923-2011) was born in Switzerland, spent his childhood in India, and was educated in England. His studies at Oxford were interrupted by WWII, but as a conscientious objector he worked on a smallholding for the duration of the conflict, while also completing his first novel, The Dark Tower, which was published in 1946, while he was still an undergraduate. He worked for the British Council for 15 years-in Italy, Greece, Finland, and Japan successively-while also regularly publishing novels, poems and short stories. In 1966, he returned to England and became a full-time writer and critic. He published more than 50 books over his lifetime, the accolades for which include the Somerset Maugham Award, the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize, and the Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished Service to Literature. Twice nominated for the Booker Prize, he was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and President of PEN International.