Domestic Animal

A witty, heartbreaking tale of unrequited love by "one of the finest and most remarkable 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-and he knows it. One who falls under his spell is Dick Thompson, a successful middle-aged novelist from whom Antonio rents a room. For the first time in years, Dick finds himself desperately, passionately in love, but the games the manipulative Italian plays with him throw the older man`s life into chaos. Published only three years after the decriminalization of homosexuality in the UK, A Domestic Animal is Francis King`s most intimate and daringly autobiographical novel: a "wry, anguished study . . . of love and jealousy [that] is hard to forget" (Robert Baldick, The Daily Telegraph).