The Fifth Child

Doris Lessing · 1988 CE · Novel · English · Contemporary

Harriet and David marry against the temper of the nineteen-sixties, buy an enormous Victorian house beyond their means and fill it with children and holiday guests. The fifth pregnancy is wrong from the first weeks — what is inside her kicks like an animal and will not let her sleep — and the boy who arrives has a squashed face and a grip that breaks bones. Lessing turns the changeling folktale on a family that had made happiness a programme.

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