A Domestic Animal

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: a “wry, anguished study . . . of love and jealousy [that] is hard to forget” (Robert Baldick, Daily Telegraph).

“Few English novelists have written with more might and assurance.”

—The Spectator

“A delicate and truly touching story . . . horribly true to life.”

—Robert Garioch, The Listener

“King is a writer’s writer, his voice is utterly convincing.” 

—Beryl Bainbridge

“One of the finest and most remarkable of English novelists of our time.”

—The Scotsman

“He deserves the widest possible readership.” 

—Melvyn Bragg, Punch

“No one writes better prose than Francis King.”

—Ruth Rendell 

“Witty, poignant, socially and internationally telling, it traps the tragi-comic essence of love that not merely isn’t but can’t be reciprocated.”

—Brigid Brophy

“Wryly tender and painful … He is writing about love in all its aspects of greed, devotion, happiness and loss.”

—Janice Elliott, Sunday Telegraph

“The author investigates his chosen examples of emotional blight with sympathy, precision, and immense skill.”

—The Evening Standard

“His writing is like fine china . . . This book’s strength is its dark stab of feeling.”

—Philip Norman, The Sunday Times

“[Francis King’s] writing is always accomplished and elegant.”

—A. S. Byatt

“A most accomplished writer who commands both deftness and feeling.”

—Christopher Wordsworth, The Guardian

“Francis King commands a noteworthy talent; he is one of a number of contemporary British novelists who deserve the best attention here.” 

 —New York Herald Tribune Book Review

“Master of a subtle, melancholy style, rich and understated.”

 —Roxanna Robinson, New York Times Book Review

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.

A Domestic Animal • ISBN: 9781961341708

Jan 13, 2026 • $19.00 • McNALLY EDITIONS no. 48

Paperback with flaps • 5” x 8.5” • 256 pages

eBook ISBN: 9781961341715