Teresa tried to imagine what it was like, believing yourself to be the only person in the world like yourself, knowing you are alone, dependent on chance kindness, used but then abandoned - but she couldn't imagine it, only a panic of emptiness and aloneness that gripped her, making her cold and sick. Ben, in the World is a sequel to Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child (first published in 1988), which I read in Finnish just over a year ago. TFC is clearly not a novel that you should read when you're pregnant (if you want to avoid nightmares about monstrous babies!), but the sequel sounded like a safer choice: Ben has grown up and left his family and childhood home. He tries to cope in the modern world as an outsider, a freak - somewhere between a Neanderthal, an animal and a child - violent and scared, only trusting his instincts. While TFC was more about the relationship between a mother and a difficult child - particularly from the mother's perspective, Ben, in...