Memoir: John Houghton, an adoptive father, had struggled for more than a decade to parent a "psychopath", when a social worker involved from the beginning admitted that she had always known the adoption wouldn't work out.
This chillingly casual admission was, for John, further proof that the social services's adoption machine was offering childless couples the heaven-sent offer of "forever families", while delivering a living hell.
The Houghtons' ready-made family were aged five, three and 18 months when they were torn from the security of their individual foster families and handed over simultaneously to John and his wife, Marina. The two brothers and a sister shared a biological mother, a disturbed woman who had a total of seven children by nearly as many men. The eldest, Kieran, had been sexually abused by one of his biological mother's boyfriends, which was why the three children were put into care. All three shared a wound that can't be healed: "attachment disorder", which is common among adopted children, although the "experts" never told John and Marina about it.
The couple learned the hard way that when a child is missing that single, most important piece of the puzzle of mental stability - the early months when the baby is secure in its mother's embrace - that piece can never be substituted even with all the love in the world. The Houghton children were compelled to relive their mother's early rejection of them, taking pains to prove how unlovable they were, often through violence so frightening for John he would call the police.
John Houghton is the pseudonym for a "distinguished writer" - and let's hope his identity remains secret because no child should have to live with the public disclosures he makes. Marina is a top executive who is not-quite-God, John tells us, but does work at God's right hand. John writes from home, indulging his reluctance, at times, to leave the house, while sipping from his well-stocked "cellar".
They are typical, Oxford-educated, Radio 4-listening, members of the smug, middle-class meritocracy with their big, old stripped-pine London house furnished with books and flat-packs from IKEA. Their children, in ordinary circumstances, would have easily followed in their Oxford footsteps, John suggests.
But not these children, who were pre-programmed to follow a dark path that the couple could only try to illuminate. The eldest, Kieran, was a dab hand with an IKEA flatpack, but could not manage high school, much less Oxford, which John found hard to take. Paul and Cate followed the same pattern of educational failure, their needs never addressed by the system despite their parents' efforts.
This was the least of their problems. Kieran's past of sexual abuse lingered in the form of lascivious and frightening sexualised behaviour, as though being raped was the only form of love he could understand. He seemed to have overcome this, until Marina happened upon 13-year-old Kieran abusing the half-naked 10-year-old Cate, who revealed that the abuse had been going on for the previous four years.
The couple reported Kieran to the police, they un-adopted him and had him put back into "care", a move the two younger children resented since it proved to them that they, too, could be rejected if they misbehaved, spoiling their expectations of having unconditional love come what may.
John began drinking heavily and Marina was rarely home before 7 pm, although she was adored by the children with whom she had a stronger emotional connection. John felt angry at being left out.
A psychiatrist blamed Marina - not the hapless adoption system - because she had selfishly "wanted it all" and couldn't cope. John clutched at this until the couple's loud, bitter arguments destroyed their marriage in all but name.
Meanwhile, Kieran, who was living on the streets as often as not, kept making pathetic attempts to get back into the family that had rejected him - at one point John and Marina even hired him as their cleaner - making him the most tragic figure of all in this brilliantly written memoir, riveting from the first page.
It is an invaluable glimpse into a side of adoption rarely exposed: what happens when adopted children are so damaged that normal family life is impossible.
• Kate Holmquist is an Irish Times journalist. Her first novel, The Glass Room, will be published by Penguin Ireland in August
A Forever Family: A True Story of Adoption By John Houghton Faber & Faber, 263pp. £14.99
