A chilling novel from the bestselling author of Room.

'Impossible to put down' Stephen King Lib Wright, a young English nurse, arrives in an impoverished Irish village on a strange mission. Eleven-year-old Anna O’Donnell is said to have eaten nothing for months but appears to be thriving miraculously. Lib’s job is simple: to watch the girl and uncover the truth. An educated sceptic, Lib expects to expose the fast as a hoax right away. But as she gets to know the girl she becomes more and more unsure. Is Anna a fraud, or a `living wonder’? Or is something more sinister unfolding right before Lib’s eyes? Written with all the propulsive tension that transported readers of Room, The Wonder asks what lengths we would go to for the love of a child. `A superb stylist – her prose is stirring and tender, her period setting alive’ Sunday Times `A thrilling domestic psychodrama that draws its power from quotidian detail as well as gothic horror’ Guardian

A major film from the makers of Normal People and Room, starring Florence Pugh and streaming on Netflix.

An eleven-year-old girl 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 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. Pitting all the seductions of fundamentalism against sense and love, it is a searing examination of what nourishes us, body and soul.