The Wonder

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What to expect

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

Critics Review

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
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

User Reviews

Book 4.7
Narration 4.7
5.0
5.0
Found both the story and the narration to be really gripping. This is the kind of story that is really enhanced by being an audiobook and the narration is brilliant.
megchaplin 10/12/2023
4.0
4.0
Laurie 🐱 20/01/2023
5.0
5.0
I decided to listen to this book based on a recommendation from Xigxag without knowing anything about it. Suffice to say it was a great recommendation! Compelling and gripping, I simply couldn't stop listening until I finished it.

The narration was perfect and the way the narrator talks and sings in places in a faint, childish Irish brogue is incredibly atmospheric.

Highly recommend this book, and it had made me want to read more books by Emma Donaghue.
elleninelle 23/11/2022

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