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 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
'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
Author
About Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue was born in Ireland in 1969 and lived in England before moving to Canada. Emma writes fiction (including the bestselling Slammerkin), drama for stage and radio, and literary history; Room is her seventh novel. Some of the places she found her inspiration : Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), feralchildren.com, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856), John Fowles’s The Collector (1963), Anne Frank’s Diary (1947), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Terminator 2 : Judgment Day (1991), The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs (1966), but above all in conversation with my five-year-old son.
