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.

"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" - 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" - 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" - Cosmopolitan

"Ingenious " - Wall Street Journal

"Lib is a heroine the modern woman can admire" - Time Magazine