The Wonder

(Paperback)

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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.

Reviews

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 *

Author Bio

Born in Dublin in 1969, and now living in Canada, Emma Donoghue writes fiction (novels and short stories, contemporary and historical, most recently The Pull of the Stars), as well as drama for screen and stage. Room was a New York Times Best Book of 2010 and a finalist for the Man 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 adaptation starring Brie Larson. She co-wrote the screenplay for the film of The Wonder, starring Florence Pugh, from Netflix. For more information, visit www.emmadonoghue.com.