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 the New York Times called "a horror story of maternity and the nightmare of social collapse . . . a moral fable of the genre that includes Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and George Orwell's 1984."

• The Metamorphosis: A New Translation by Susan Bernofsky
• As We Are Now: A Novel
• The Island of Dr. Moreau (Dover Thrift Editions)
• Principles of Economics
• Frankenstein (Second Edition) (Norton Critical Editions)
• Ben, In the World: The Sequel to the Fifth Child
• Grendel
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Pop. 1280 (Mulholland Classic)
• The Ballad of the Sad Cafe: and Other Stories