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Domestic Animal

Francis King
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A Boy's Own Story
A. S. Byatt
A01=Francis King
Alan Hollinghurst
Author_Francis King
autobiographical novel
bad romance
bisexual
Booker Prize
Category=FBA
Category=FC
conscientious objector
decriminalization of homosexuality
E. M. Forster Maurice
Edmund White
eq_bestseller
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_modern-contemporary
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
Florence
forbidden desire
forbidden romance
gay love affair
Golden PEN Award for a Lifetime's Distinguished
great English novelists
Italian lover
James Baldwin Giovanni's Room
Katherine Mansfield Short Story Prize
Leave the World Behind
LGBTQ+
Lolita
Nabokovian
novels about novelists
obsession
Royal Society of Literature
Ruth Rendell
Service to Literature
sexual longing
Somerset Maugham Award
The Dark Tower novel
The Line of Beauty
transgressive
unrequited desire
unrequited love

Product details

  • ISBN 9781961341708
  • Dimensions: 127 x 215mm
  • Publication Date: 26 Feb 2026
  • Publisher: McNally Jackson Books
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Paperback
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Description

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).
About Francis King
Francis King (1923–2011) was born in Switzerland, spent his childhood in India, and was educated in England. While still an undergraduate at Oxford, he completed his first novel, The Dark Tower, which was published in 1946. 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, 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. Rumaan Alam is the author of four novels. He lives in New York City.

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