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Paperback A Domestic Animal Book

ISBN: 1961341700

ISBN13: 9781961341708

A domestic animal

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Format: Paperback

$15.75
Releases Jan 13, 2026

Book Overview

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).

Related Subjects

Fiction Literature & Fiction

Customer Reviews

1 customer rating | 1 review

Rated 4 stars
Unrequited love for a charming Italian

Dick Thompson is a successful middle-aged novelist living in a seaside university town, socially he is has many women friends, but he is in fact gay. Then through one of his female friends, Penny, he acquires a lodger, Antonio, Italian, a handsome and charming young philosopher and one time professional footballer who is visiting England to work at the university for research. He has left his wife and two children at home...

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