The Fifth Child
Doris Lessing

Harriet and David Lovatt's life is a glorious hymn to domestic bliss and old-fashioned family values : four children, a beautiful house, the love of relatives and friends. But when their fifth child is born, a sickly and implacable shadow is cast over this tender idyll. Large and ugly, the infant Ben is violent and uncontrollable. Struggling to care for her new-born child, faced with a darkness and a strange defiance she has never known before, Harriet is deeply afraid of what, exactly, she has brought into the world .. .