Description

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.

Publisher Review

Emma Donoghue’s writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into horror and horror into tenderness — Audrey 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 itself — Sarah 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 destroy — Stephen King * New York Times Book Review * A riveting allegory about the trickle-down effect of trauma * Vogue * Donoghue mines material that on the face of it appears intractably bleak and surfaces with a powerful, compulsively readable work of fiction * Irish Times * Deliciously gothic * USA Today * Heartbreaking and transcendent * New York Times * Fans of Emma Donoghue’s first novel Room will not be disappointed with The Wonder . . . a tale of claustrophobic suspense and the intense relationship between a woman and a child * Red Magazine * Like [Room], The Wonder explores a dark, insular, and rigidly controlled environment . . . there is more to this mystery than superstitions and local dialect. * The Oprah Magazine * Donoghue proves herself endlessly inventive . . . This is the kind of book that will keep you up at night and make you smarter — Julie Buntin * Cosmopolitan * Ingenious * Wall Street Journal * Lib is a heroine the modern woman can admire * Time Magazine *