Emma Donoghue says, “My publishers initially choked when I offered them a novel about eight children, with four parents. One editor suggested I trim this down to a ‘big family of five kids.’ But by my standards (having grown up in an Irish Catholic clan in the 1970s), five was a puny total. Also, I needed the kids to outnumber the parents, to create enough pleasurable havoc. So we compromised: I culled the kids to seven.”