Vacationing at the seashore, a young boy's endurance is tested to the limit when he tries to swim through an underwater tunnel.

Many will recall the powerful impact The Fifth Child, Doris Lessing's 1988 novel, made on publication. Its account of idyllic marital and parental bliss irredeemably shattered by the arrival of the feral fifth child of the Lovatts made for unnerving and compulsive reading. That child, Ben, now grown to legal maturity, is the central character of this sequel, which picks up the fable at the end of the childhood where the first book ended and takes...