Wonder

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 TimesEleven-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, 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, A riveting allegory about the trickle-down effect of trauma, Donoghue mines material that on the face of it appears intractably bleak and surfaces with a powerful, compulsively readable work of fiction

Born in Dublin in 1969, and now living in Canada, Emma Donoghue writes fiction (novels and short stories, contemporary and historical), as well as drama for screen and stage. Room was shortlisted for the Booker, Commonwealth and Orange Prizes, selling between two and three million copies in forty languages. Donoghue was nominated for an Academy Award for her 2015 film adaptation starring Brie Larson. She also co-wrote the screenplay for the film of The Wonder, starring Florence Pugh.