The Fifth Child
The married couple in this novel pull off a remarkable achievement: They purchase a three-story house with oodles of bedrooms, and, on a middle-class income, in the '70s, fill it to the brim with happy children and visiting relatives. Their holiday gatherings are sumptuous celebrations of life and togetherness. And then the fifth child arrives. He's just a child--he's not supernatural. But is he really human? This is an elegantly written tale that theNew York Timescalled "a horror story of maternity and the nightmare of social collapse . . . a moral fable of the genre that includes Mary Shelley'sFrankensteinand George Orwell's1984."--This text refers to thePaperbackedition.