Domestic Animal

A tragicomic novel of unrequited love by "e;one of the finest and most remarkable of English novelists of our time."e; (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).