The Dividing Stream

Description

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 . . .

Born in Switzerland, Francis King spent his childhood in India, where his father was a government official. While still an undergraduate at Oxford he published his first three novels. He then joined the British Council, working in Italy, Greece, Egypt, Finland and Japan, before he resigned to devote himself entirely to writing. For some years he was drama critic for the Sunday Telegraph and he reviewed fiction regularly for the Spectator. He won the Somerset Maugham Prize, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Yorkshire Post Novel of the Year Award for Act of Darkness (1983). His penultimate book, The Nick of Time, was long-listed for the 2003 Man Booker Prize. Francis King died in 2011. "One of our great writers, of the calibre of Graham Greene and Nabokov." Beryl Bainbridge