The Wonder

Emma Donoghue

2016 Nominee

Bord Gáis Energy Eason Novel of the Year

2017 Nominee

Kerry Group Irish Novel Award

10 November 2022
9781035021444
589 pages

Synopsis

A major film from the makers of Normal People and Room, starring Florence Pugh and streaming on Netflix.

'An old-school page turner with crackling intensity' Stephen King
'Powerful, compulsively readable' Irish Times


Eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell stops eating, but remains miraculously alive and well. A nurse, sent to investigate whether she is a fraud, meets a journalist hungry for a story . . .

Set in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, Emma Donoghue's The Wonder – inspired by numerous European and North American cases of 'fasting girls' between the sixteenth century and the twentieth – is a psychological thriller about a child's murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes.

Emma Donoghue's writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into horror and horror into tenderness
Fascinating . . . Like The Turn of the Screw, the novel opens irresistibly, when a young woman with a troubled past gets an enigmatic posting in a remote place . . . Heartbreaking and transcendent and almost religious in itself
A fine, fact-based historical novel, an old-school page turner . . . Donoghue has written, with crackling intensity, about [spirituality's] power to destroy