An 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 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.