The Wonder
Emma Donoghue
2016 Nominee
Bord Gáis Energy Eason Novel of the Year
2017 Nominee
Kerry Group Irish Novel Award
02 May 2024
9781035038824Synopsis
Now a major Netflix film from the makers of Normal People and Room, starring Florence Pugh.
'An old-school page turner with crackling intensity' – Stephen King
'Powerful, compulsively readable' – The 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.
Part of the Picador Collection, a series celebrating fifty years of Picador books and showcasing the best of modern literature.
Emma Donoghue's writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into horror and horror into tendernessAudrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife
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 itselfSarah Lyall, New York Times
A fine, fact-based historical novel, an old-school page turner . . . Donoghue has written, with crackling intensity, about [spirituality's] power to destroyStephen King, New York Times Book Review
