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""The Fifth Child has the intensity of a nightmare, a horror story poised somewhere between a naturalistic account of family life and an allegory that draws on science fiction. Read it and tremble."" CLARE TOMALIN, Independent ""The Fifth Child is a book to send shivers down your spine, but one which it is impossible to put down until it is finished. Doris Lessing's power to captivate and convince is evident from the first, and the effect of the odd, alien child on the family is conveyed with quiet understatement which adds to the mounting sense of horror."" Sunday Times ""A powerful fable. Like the story of Frankenstein or the Minotaur, it generates all sorts of uneasiness. Its strength is expressive not didactic. A disturbing vision, The Fifth Child offers a faithful if chilling reflection of the world we live in."" Sunday Telegraph ""Doris Lessing can take any genre she chooses and brilliantly reinvent it; this time, the horror story. The Fifth Child is dramatic and memorable, playing as it does upon a most ancient fear."" JUDY COOKE, Guardian

Ever unpredictable, Lessing now offers a rather cryptic yet uncommonly accessible tale of psycho-social horror: a variation on the classic changeling formula - here marbled, subtly and disturbingly, with such Lessing themes as apocalyptic doom, the rough dignity of society's outcasts, and the dark underside of human nature. (The five-novel Martha Quest series, Lessing readers will remember, is called Children of Violence.) In the 1960's, that greedy and selfish time of alienation and bad news from everywhere, young architect David (terribly old-fashioned) meets solid, homey Harriet (a grownup virgin) - and soon they're a couple, blissful and confident in their sharing of all the traditional, unfashionable values. They buy a big house (with help from David's wealthy father), joyfully begin having babies (they want at least seven or eight), and become the happy center of rich, extended family life, continually visited by assorted in-laws. Circa 1972, they're relieved and grateful: they had chosen, and so obstinately, the best - this. With Harriet's fifth pregnancy, however, this idyll (quickly, hypnotically sketched) begins to fall under a sickly, expanding, implacable shadow. The expectant mother is tormented by the fierce, unnaturally strong fetus. When born, baby Ben is heavy, muscular, creepy-looking - like a troll, or a goblin or something - and violent. As a child, he's hostile, unteachable, neanderthal dike, more dangerously violent (he kills a dog, then turns to humans) with each passing year. The family is splintered, cruelly transformed - by fear, shame, and furious sorrow (especially vulnerable little Paul). Eventually, urged on by David and flinty Grandma Dorothy, Harriet agrees to give Ben over to one of those places that exist in order to take on children families simply want to get rid of. But, in a truly nightmarish sequence, the mother reclaims her unlovable horror-child from a death-ward for the unwanted. And, through sheer willpower and ruthless shrewdness, Harriet manages a sort of coexistence between the family (forever fractured) and the throwback - though the teen-age Ben inevitably takes off to roam the earth with the punks and outlaws who accept him. Perhaps quite soon. . . she would be looking at the box, and there, in a shot of the News of Berlin, Madrid, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, she would see Ben, standing rather apart from the crowd, staring at the camera with his goblin eyes, or searching the faces in the crowd for another of his own kind. As a symbolic summing-up of the past three decades, from Sixties cataclysm to Eighties terrorism, this short novel is vaguely provocative at best; the even broader, socio-anthropological subtext - civilized, familial mankind forced to confront the primitive animal within - is only slightly more persuasive. But, despite echoes of pop-fiction (Rosemary's Baby, etc.) and TV-movie case-histories (damaged child, valiant mum), the plain story itself - fine-tuned with ordinary-life details yet also insidiously fable-like - is stark, relentless, and memorably harrowing. (Kirkus Reviews)

Many mothers will be familiar with the emotions Harriet has when she first sets eyes on Ben, her fifth child. Initial disbelief, a reluctance to hold him, a pang of disappointment. There is something strange and disturbing about him. Harriet and her husband David have constructed an idyll of perfect happiness in their large house full of children and relatives, but when Ben is born, their world is torn apart. Ben is weird looking, he doesn't speak but makes odd grunts and noises, and he doesn't seem quite human. Although at first you seriously doubt whether there is anything really wrong with the poor child, at the same time you begin to dislike him. Sympathy only comes when Ben is briefly banished to a special home in a bleak Scottish landscape, a drugged creature in a straitjacket. Rescued by his mother and brought back to the family home he becomes ever more nightmarishly 'different' and succeeds in shattering the family. Harriet's dogged devotion is then all the more remarkable as you come ultimately to realize the real and terrible nature of the creature that is Ben. This novel, reprinted five times, is a riveting read and a haunting addition to Lessing's body of work. (Kirkus UK)

' The Fifth Child has the intensity of a nightmare, a horror story poised somewhere between a naturalistic account of family life and an allegory that draws on science fiction. Read it and tremble.' Clare Tomalin, Independent ' The Fifth Child is a book to send shivers down your spine, but one which it is impossible to put down until it is finished. Doris Lessing's power to captivate and convince is evident from the first, and the effect of the odd, alien child on the family is conveyed with quiet understatement which adds to the mounting sense of horror.' Sunday Times 'A disturbing vision, The Fifth Child offers a faithful if chilling reflection of the world we live in.' Sunday Telegraph

Author Information

Doris Lessing was one of the most important writers of the second half of the 20th-century and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 2007. Her novels include The Grass is Singing, The Golden Notebook and The Good Terrorist. In 2001, Lessing was awarded the David Cohen Prize for a lifetime's achievement in British literature. In 2008, The Times ranked her fifth on a list of ""The 50 greatest British writers since 1945"". She died in 2013.

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