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The Wonder

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The Wonder

By: Emma Donoghue
Narrated by: Tara Egan-Langley
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About this listen

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

 Genre Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological Thriller & Suspense Women's Fiction

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
All stars
Most relevant
I enjoyed Room, so was intrigued to read The Wonder. And while it finished well (thank god), the pay off for my patience barely made up for 6 hours of deliberation on why little Anna won’t eat (aka the old “slow build”). Problem is, this painstakingly slow build is not so much a build as an plateaued excuse to string along the reader to make what really is a very short story, into a novel length longer one. So I can only recommend it for those with the patience of a saint.

Why won’t she eat, let me count the ways

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I was very disappointed by this book. The first seven chapters were excruciatingly repetitive and boring. The rest of it was unrealistic and drawn out and boring.
Thumbs down from me

Not such a great read

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