From the Man Booker long-listed author of The Nick of Time, An Act of Darkness and A Domestic Animal comes a gripping novel of passion and betrayal. In Florence, Max Westfield is on a business trip. His wife and children have accompanied him. But instead of the holiday Max had intended, living together in the heat of the Italian sun has shaken the family and pulled their underlying problems to the surface. Max finds himself in the middle of a tangled web of desire. His marital problems are compounded when his wife begins a sordid affair whilst someone close to him makes their romantic intentions towards him clear. The situation intensifies and reaches a dangerous peak, and it isn't long until someone gets seriously hurt . . .

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...

Francis King's range, both geographical and emotional, was always as remarkable in his short stories as in his novels. In this collection, there are stories that are poignantly valedictory, like the title one, with its unflinching examination of the relationships between a tough, self-willed elderly man and the young woman determined to exploit him. There are three chilling stories of the supernatural, 'Now You See It', set in Egypt, 'The Pushchair', set in Brighton, and 'The Sitting Tenant', set in contemporary London. In 'Dreams', an old man recollects an event—the most important of his whole life, he now realises—that took place during a school holiday in Belgium during the immediate prelude to World War Two. 'Everyone is Nobody' is a devastating study of bereavement. Without exception, all the stories show King's characteristic combination of subtlety and force of emotion.'His voice is utterly convincing' Beryl Bainbridge, Daily Telegraph

In a lonely house above Dartmouth Bay lives General Sir Hugh Weir: a solitary figure, austere to the point of vanity and as contemptuous of weakness in others as in himself. Behind him he has left a trail of broken lives – friends, lover, wife, son. Now two more people begin to feel the force of his restless compelling nature: Shirley Forsdike, a neurotic, hero-worshipping schoolmistress who has yet to meet him, and Frank Cauldwell, an impecunious young writer. Out of the shifting conflict raised by their emotions and experiences Francis King constructed a taut novel of passion and despair.'Mr King writes with such sensitivity, penetration and emotional delicacy' Daily Telegraph

'A book dealing with modern problems and rightly longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. King is a writer's writer, his voice utterly convincing' Beryl Bainbridge, Books of the Year, Daily TelegraphFrancis King's provocative and adventurous novel looks at the havoc wrought when a young Kosovan – an illegal immigrant – finds himself in London. Mehmet leads a double life befriending and lodging with an elderly woman who suffers from MS, while at the same time having an affair with a female doctor and throwing himself onto the London gay scene. Disaster looms when he begins a relationship with a gay protector – and is arrested because of his illegal status.'Very much of here and now . . . entirely persuasive' Penelope Lively, The Spectator'I loved The Nick of Time, very enjoyable and subversive, with a highly engaging hero whose bad behaviour made compulsive reading – his exploits were most entertaining' Margaret Drabble'King's...

Murder. A violent death in horrifying circumstances detonates the atmosphere of languor and sexual tension in the Thompson household. Francis King's disturbing novel opens in India in the 1930s, in the lush summer house of the Thompson family. Father, stepmother, daughter, governess, ayah – all are under suspicion. And the most sinister of motives merely deflects the truth as it slithers out of reach until a final reunion in Australia decades later.

Was it simply, in the coroner's words, a stupid and tragic accident? Sybil Crawfurd would never have expected her brother, Hugo, to die like that, so suddenly, in a fall from the balcony of a Brighton hotel . . . The handsome, intelligent headmistress of a girls' school on the south coast, Sybil is not alone in desperately wanting 'but two hours converse with the dead'. Lavinia Trent, the well-known actress, and Bridget Nagel, whose journalist husband was killed in the Falklands, are equally ready to enter the bizarre, comic, unnerving world of paranormal experiment . . .'Gripping entertainment form start to finish' Listener'False trail follows false trail; the curtain is tantalizingly lifted and then, again, lowered . . . King is now writing at the height of his powers' Spectator'His most masterful, comic and moving novel yet' Financial Times'One of the most haunting and haunted novels of the year' Sunday Times

First published in 1956, under the pseudonym "Frank Cauldwell", this accomplished comedy of manners is set among British expatriates and exotic locals in a Greece still undiscovered by tourism. Written with an infectious enjoyment and good humour, the story of the flamboyant and temperamental Colonel Theodore Grecos and his devotion to the completely unsophisticated Götz Joachim provides Francis King with ample scope for his mastery of ironic observation. In the Introduction to this edition, the author explains how The Firewalkers came to be written, born out of "the exhilarating sense of liberation that came to me on first setting foot in Athens".