The Wonder

Emma Donoghue

2016 Nominee

Bord Gáis Energy Eason Novel of the Year

2017 Nominee

Kerry Group Irish Novel Award

18 May 2017
9781509818402
368 pages

Synopsis

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

An eleven-year-old girl 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 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. Pitting all the seductions of fundamentalism against sense and love, it is a searing examination of what nourishes us, body and soul.

Emma Donoghue's writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into horror and horror into tenderness
Donoghue mines material that on the face of it appears intractably bleak and surfaces with a powerful, compulsively readable work of fiction
Vivid, tender . . . Her contemporary thriller Room made the author an international bestseller, but this gripping tale offers a welcome reminder that her historical fiction is equally fine.