The Wonder
Emma Donoghue
2016 Nominee
Bord Gáis Energy Eason Novel of the Year
2017 Nominee
Kerry Group Irish Novel Award
Synopsis
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 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. 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
Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife
Donoghue mines material that on the face of it appears intractably bleak and surfaces with a powerful, compulsively readable work of fiction
Irish Times
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.
Kirkus, Starred Review
