Wonder

A major film from the makers of Normal People and Room, starring Florence Pugh and streaming on Netflix.'An old-school page turner with crackling intensity' Stephen King'Powerful, compulsively readable' 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.

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 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish writer who spent eight years in England before moving to Canada. Her fiction includes Slammerkin, Life Mask, Touchy Subjects, The Wonder, and the international bestseller Room (shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes).