Faber & Faber

Like Elaine Feinstein's A Circle, Francis King's A Domestic Animal is another acclaimed novel from 1970 that was never considered for the Booker Prize. Now, with the announcement of the 'lost' Booker Prize, King's novel is in the news again. Like A Circle, it was a painful book for the author to write, as Francis King explains.

'Autobiographical in inspiration, its story that of an obsessive love that devoured more than a year of my existence, this was the most painful novel that I have ever had either to live or to write.

With the aftermath of its publication, the anguish merely worsened. A former Labour M.P., Tom Skeffington-Lodge, a Brighton friend and neighbour, concluded, I must admit with justification, that a woman character was based on himself and at once sued for libel. In consequence I had to sell my beautiful house in Brighton to pay the lawyers of everyone concerned and at once fell off the property ladder.

Since the obsessive love was a homosexual one, many of the reviewers found the book at best distasteful and at worst disgusting and when at last a new version was reissued took an all too obvious pleasure in laying into it.

Yet the remarkable thing is that the book has survived, being repeatedly reprinted  and bringing me more fan-letters that any other of my works. Its recent appearance on the ‘Lost’ 1970 Booker list is a proof that it still pulses with life despite all the drubbings so gleefully administered to it over so many years.'

-- Francis King, February 2010

Click here for more on the 'lost' Booker Prize.