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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.

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.

©2016 Emma Donoghue (P)2022 Macmillan Publishers International Limited Fiction Historical Fiction Literary Fiction Psychological 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)

What listeners say about The Wonder

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

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.

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Not such a great read

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

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