Mervyn - though that's no longer his name - is living a new life, married to the person who brought him out of a traumatised and silent world some years ago. But one day he receives a typescript through the post, written by his former schoolfriend, Bob, the man he once loved. The typescript hides nothing - an unflattering pseudonym doesn't disguise Mervyn's identity, and it brings back to him the reasons for his silence, his own crime and Bob's culpability.
Mervyn relives the past as he reads the typescript - the unhappy boyhood between the wars, his loyalty to his shell-shocked father and his neglectful, attention-seeking mother, who seduced and discarded Bob before she found the man she called The One and Only. But Bob becomes something more to Mervyn, and when Bob suggests a way of taking revenge upon Mervyn's mother, it leads to whole new world of betrayal and trauma
Faber Finds has reissued eight of Francis King's unfailingly excellent novels including "Domestic Animal" which was long-listed for the retrospective 1970 Booker Award.
