Since Madeleine McCann went missing on May 3, parents have experienced a wave of different emotions: pangs of sympathy, nagging doubts and disapproval.

Now the new Man Booker Prize winner, Anne Enright, herself a mother of two young children, has put this mass of contradictory feelings into words.

In an article entitled Disliking the McCanns, the Irish novelist describes her discomfort at the behaviour of Kate and Gerry McCann after Madeleine’s disappearance, even saying that she disliked the couple “earlier than most people”.

In the London Review of Books, which was published a fortnight before she won the 2007 award for The Gathering, she wrote: “In August, the sudden conviction that the McCanns ‘did it’ swept over our own family holiday in a peculiar hallelujah. Of course they had. It made a lot more sense to me than their leaving the children to sleep alone.” She goes on to detail her evolution into an armchair detective who pored over the evidence at night and questioned the McCanns’ choices. “The move from unease, through rumour, to mass murder took no time flat,” she wrote.

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Enright, whose children are 7 and 4, admits reacting worst to Mr McCann, whose “need to ‘influence the investigation” she found more provoking than the “flat sadness, or the very occasional glimpse of a wounded narcis-sism” that directs public animosity towards “Madeleine's beautiful mother”. “The sad fact is that this man cannot speak properly about what is happening to himself and his wife, and about what he wants. The language he uses is more appropriate to a corporate executive than to a desperate father.”

But despite the doubts, she wrote: “Then I go to bed and wake up the next day, human again, liking the McCanns.” She added: “I disliked the McCanns earlier than most people (I’m not proud of it). I thought I was angry with them for leaving their children alone.

“In fact, I was angry at their failure to accept that their daughter was probably dead. I wanted them to grieve, which is to say go away. In this, I am as bad as people who complain that ‘she does not cry’.”

Yesterday the McCanns, both 39, from Leicestershire, denied reports that they believed that their daughter was dead and praised Portuguese detectives for reviewing the investigation into her disappearance.

“Contrary to some other reports Kate and I do not accept that Madeleine is ‘probably’ dead,” Mr McCann wrote on his internet blog. “We know it is a possibility, however the fact there is no evidence Madeleine has been seriously harmed gives us hope that she will be found alive.”

Mr McCann, a hospital consultant, and his wife, a GP, have been helping to organise new publicity efforts to promote the international search for Madeleine. An £80,000 poster campaign began yesterday, concentrating on remote villages in southern Portugal and Spain.

The couple were made official suspects in the case last month. Portuguese detectives believe that Madeleine may have been accidentally killed by Mrs McCann and that the couple illegally disposed of her corpse and falsified an abduction.

But the new head of the inquiry, Paulo Rebelo, has ordered officers to consider all options after a judge ruled that there was insufficient evidence to reinterview the couple.

The Times revealed that police in Britain, Germany and the Netherlands have been asked to take DNA samples and fingerprints from holiday-makers who were at the Ocean Club resort when Madeleine disappeared.

Mr Rebelo is also preparing to request that Leicestershire police arrange interviews with the seven Britons who were on holiday with the McCanns in Portugal. He wants to clarify their movements on the night of the disappearance and apparent contradictions in their statements to police.

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