The One and Only

Description

The Press could make Mervyn's life a misery, if they knew where he lived. But they don't. Mervyn has adopted an assumed name and established a quiet life for himself in a small town near Brighton. Then the typescript arrives. It is the autobiography of Mervyn's former school friend Bob, and it reveals not merely everything about their relationship but also Mervyn's new name and his whereabouts. If published, it would ruin Mervyn's life. And it would kill his sweet, gently wife, Noreen. But what is it that Mervyn has done? He seems a wholly admirable man. He runs a quiet little antique shop, and with unstinting devotion he cares for Noreen, who is crippled with arthritis. Francis King's skilful excavation of the past brings us both a love story and the story of a horrific crime. Young Mervyn, we learn, was seduced by the ugly, brilliant, sexually-precocious Bob. Mervyn's mother Bella was a frivolous upper class socialist, whose chief interest in life was men. Her uncaring treatment of the boys led them first to hatred and then to the conception of a dark plan . . . This is a taut, unsparing novel, in which Francis King springs a whole series of surprises on the reader.

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