Businessmen as Lovers
- Author: Rosemary Tonks (England)
- Book type: English novel from 1969
- Publisher: New Directions Publishing
- Released: March 24, 2026
- Length: 160 pages
- Format: paperback / ebook
- Prize: $ 16,95
- Order book from: Amazon / Bol
Rosemary Tonks Businessmen as Lovers review
- “Tonks throws out aphorisms, and scorn, like loose change.” (London Review of Books)
- “Uncommonly good.” (The Guardian)
Blurb of the 1969 novel by Rosemary Tonks
Friends and lovers frolic on a sun-soaked Italian vacation—but in classic Tonks style, everything boils over with operatic drama, misanthropy, and arch silliness.
Mimi and Caroline set off to a beautiful Italian island, where they find themselves part of an eccentric cast of expats and vacationers including their debonair host and his mistress, a proud venture capitalist, an Iranian tycoon, and a villainous, slightly tragic local dentist. There is also Mimi’s great love, Beetle, a quiet and unassuming English journalist. As everyone begins to relax and settle into the vacation, drinking and eating away the stress of everyday life, their impish plots culminate in an odd Mediterranean prank involving the dentist’s prize lemon tree.
Back in print after many decades, Businessmen as Lovers is an extraordinarily jubilant and delightful novel by the inimitable Rosemary Tonks: businessmen fall in love, too, but it is with each other.
Rosemary Tonks was born October 17, 1928 in Gillingham, Kent, Engeland. She published two poetry collections and six novels, and wrote for The Observer, The Times, The New York Review of Books, The New Statesman, and Encounter, and presented poetry programs for the BBC. Tonks died on April 15, 2014.