When my children were young, we had a succession of pets, including snakes and many variations on the cute rodent.

One day we brought home a hamster, named George. But a few days later we found that George was no longer alone in his deluxe hamster duplex. He had been joined by a cuter, smaller hamster, who could have emerged from nowhere but from George himself.

Well, Georgina was a good mother and brought Georgie junior up to be a strapping hamster lad, slightly larger than she. For a while, Georgina and Georgie junior rubbed along very well until one morning, Georgie junior was nowhere to be found. He had disappeared – except for the last chewed vestiges of his tail.

“Why?” sobbed my children. “Why would Georgina eat Georgie?”

I was at a loss. “Well,” I tried. “Maybe Georgie should have left home when he grew up? That’s what happens when children stay on indefinitely and irritate their mothers.”

For some completely unknown reason, my children believe this traumatised them forever. But I’m sure it’s a very natural urge. This is why a psychologist friend of mine gives talks to parents entitled: Why some animals eat their young.

The same, of course, is true the other way around. Most people feel the need to murder their parents at a certain point.

Hamsters aside, that’s more or less what my fifth novel is about. It explores our most basic and formative relationships – those with our parents and our children. I have tried to look squarely at the kind of unattractive urges that few people feel able to admit to in public (except perhaps obliquely through hamsters).

I have also tried to examine the push-pull of guilt and blame that surround our primary relationships. We are all damaged in some way – to a greater or lesser extent, genetically or through our upbringing.

At some stage, we all feel guilt over our children, and blame our parents. But if they’re responsible for the way we turned out, then surely we should blame their parents, and so on. How far back do we blame?

Through my voluntary work, I was privileged to meet parents of children with every kind of birth defect. I discovered that these parents undergo a process of grief. They lost, not the child itself, but their imagined child. They lost a version of themselves and were forced to reshape their personalities.

Over time, it became apparent to me that the parents of ‘typical’ children, while they might struggle to share them, also experience quite difficult feelings. The unalloyed joy expressed by mothers at the school gate, which alienated those of us struggling with motherhood, is deceptive.

These realisations began a creative process which finally found expression in this book. One of the human traits that has always fascinated me as a novelist is our propensity to lie – in order to maintain a perceived place in society and an image of self. I became interested in finding ways to portray this, and to explore a largely taboo area.

In our increasingly child-centred world, in which children are granted a rarefied, almost sanctified space, society disapproves of ambivalence. There is silence around the difficult feelings that most, possibly all, parents feel; the fact that love is not inconsistent with experiencing the loved one as a burden, and sometimes wishing that burden gone.

I am fascinated by the idea that every one of us is damaged in some way. We inherit bad eyesight, creaky back, a propensity to heart attacks or to depression. We are affected by a controlling parent or one who is too weak, by one who punishes too viciously or who fails to discipline at all. How we come to terms with that damage, and whether we are able to forgive, determines the kind of adults, and ultimately the kind of parents we become.

If you think about it, the same goes for our relationship with the country we were brought up in, which serves as both parent and child. We blame it for our damaged selves, and feel guilt for the way it turned out. I hope my story also manages to resonate with some of this complicated relationship with our communities and our nation.

The Imagined Child is about secrets, the kind we keep to maintain our own sense of self and our place in society. And it’s about trying to find the redemption which comes from facing our own flaws.