The Wrong Child cover art

The Wrong Child

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

The Wrong Child

By: Barry Gornell
Narrated by: Wiliam Gaminara
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £12.99

Buy Now for £12.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Twenty-two of the 23 children in a rural village die in a disaster. By chance, the 'wrong' child, Dog Evans, lives. Crippled with survivor's guilt, his parents abandon Evans to a feral life at the margins. He is shunned by those left behind, for whom his presence is a daily insult, a reminder of unbearable loss.

As the action moves from past to present and back, we learn what took place and its shocking consequences for both Dog Evans and the wider community. Gornell's forensic gaze dissects the lives of the bereaved, fractured relationships and existences frozen the day their children died....

Deborah Cutter, separated from her husband, John, numbs her pain with alcohol and sex. Local postman Nugget holds tight to the hope that the Evans house contains valuable secrets. Parish priest Father Wittin is an embarrassing irrelevance....

As grief turns to rage, the villagers' insatiable desire for catharsis, one final blood sacrifice, becomes unstoppable. The master of 'rural noir', Barry Gornell has created a mesmerising, heartbreaking examination of rural life with a remarkable note of hope within the darkness.

©2016 Barry Gornell (P)2016 Audible, Ltd
Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Suspense Thriller & Suspense Village Fiction

Listeners also enjoyed...

Hope Farm cover art
The Truth About These Strange Times cover art
My Own Dear Brother cover art
How It Ends cover art
The Oceans Between Us cover art
Lamb cover art
Home Fires cover art
Cal cover art
A Great Deliverance cover art
Redemption Road cover art
The Key cover art
In Her Wake cover art
The Silk Factory cover art
All stars
Most relevant
I am reluctantly sending this back after six chapters, as this required full concentration to get the full span of characters, so no good for my commuting.

So many characters, pay attention!

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.