The Wonder

By: Emma Donoghue

Narrated by: Tara Egan-Langley

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 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 is inspired by numerous European and North American cases of 'fasting girls' between the sixteenth century and the twentieth. A psychological thriller about a child's murder threatening to happen in slow motion before our eyes.

'Fans of Emma Donoghue's first novel Room will not be disappointed with The Wonder' – Red Magazine

Critic 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)

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)

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

Deliciously gothic

Heartbreaking and transcendent

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

Like [Room], The Wonder explores a dark, insular, and rigidly controlled environment . . . there is more to this mystery than superstitions and local dialect.

Donoghue proves herself endlessly inventive . . . This is the kind of book that will keep you up at night and make you smarter (Julie Buntin)

Ingenious

Lib is a heroine the modern woman can admire

Breathtaking novel, even better narration

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”

Through the eyes of an English nurse, the mystery of the miraculous starving girl is artfully revealed, as is the devastating power of belief.

The narrator expertly portrays a variety of accents and languages with ease, as well as an impressive emotional depth that brings this fantastical tale to life. A must-listen!

Wonderful!

An intruiging and extremely well
performed book - I couldn’t stop listening! Best audiobook I’ve listened to so far!