The Wonder - Emma Donoghue, Picador

Now 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 TimesAn 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 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. Pitting all the seductions of fundamentalism against sense and love, it is a searing examination of what nourishes us, body and soul.