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—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).

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

—The Spectator

“[King’s] corpus documents the evolution of norms governing the literary depiction of homosexuality . . . What makes King’s constrained fictions compelling is that his discretion is not absolute. He is almost a quintessential English novelist of manners . . . [But] he nursed an interest in the perverse; murder, cannibalism, incest, and other forbidden zones of sexuality . . . [In] A Domestic Animal . . . we find the coupling of delicacy and brutality, reticence and release, that makes King one of modern British literature’s great anatomists of repression . . . A Domestic Animal is a compact, intricately patterned story of unrequited erotic obsession, focused on the relationship between a closeted English novelist and a beautiful Italian philosopher  . . . Among the novel’s daring ideas is its suggestion that closetedness and English taciturnity are part of a common condition, each an art of concealment that simultaneously throttles vitality and encourages the redirection of energy into work and achievement.”

—Charlie Tyson, Harper’s Magazine

“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

“Francis King is a name not much heard these days, but before his death 15 years ago he was a prominent figure in the literary world . . . But good things never die, and, now, his 1970 novel A Domestic Animal is reissued by the redoubtable McNally Editions . . . The forward momentum of the story requires that this ‘foolish old queen who has lost his head over a handsome and normal Italian’ must confront his passion with Antonio — and this drives the story to developments both surprising and inevitable.”

—John Self, The Critic Magazine

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

—The Scotsman

“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

“His autobiographical novel A Domestic Animal (1970) should have been on the [Booker Prize shortlist . . . Antonio’s ultimate unattainability affords this earlier novel a haunting, mournful elegance—its virtuosity was recognised, incidentally, when it was shortlisted for the infamous ‘Lost Man Booker Prize’ in 2010 (the one-off prize that honoured the books that, due to the date of the prize having been moved that year from April to November, missed out on the opportunity of being considered for the 1970 award).”

—Lucy Scholes, The Booker Prizes

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

—Janice Elliott, The Sunday Telegraph

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

—A. S. Byatt

“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