The chilling new novel from the bestselling author of Room.
Born in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish writer who spent eight years in England before moving to Canada. Her fiction includes Slammerkin, Life Mask, Touchy Subjects and the international bestseller Room (shortlisted for the Man Booker and Orange Prizes).
The Irish potato famine has been over for seven years when The
Wonder commences but the aftereffects are everywhere . . . In an
author's note, Donoghue says that The Wonder was inspired by almost
50 cases of "so-called Fasting Girls" between the 16th and 20th
centuries . . . Donoghue's prose is as sturdy and serviceable as a
good pair of brogans , but never nondescript. There are occasional
flashes of lyricism - "a cloud loosely bandaged the waning moon,"
for instance, a line of perfect description couched in perfect
iambic pentameter - but Donoghue's main purpose here is story,
story, story, and God bless her for it . . . impossible to put down
. . . it also reminded me of The Razor's Edge, only turned inside
out. Maugham's book is about the power of spirituality to heal.
Donoghue has written with crackling intensity, about its power to
destroy
*New York Times*
Emma Donoghue's writing is superb alchemy, changing innocence into
horror and horror into tenderness
*Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife*
Donoghue mines material that on the face of it appears intractably
bleak and surfaces with a powerful, compulsively readable work of
fiction
*Irish Times*
Vivid, tender . . . Her contemporary thriller Room made the author
an international bestseller, but this gripping tale offers a
welcome reminder that her historical fiction is equally fine.
*Kirkus, Starred Review*
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 . . . Donoghue's
masterful way with words and imagery has the reader sharing Lib's
scepticism and disdain for Anna and her family's naïve religious
fervour.
*Red Magazine*
Donoghue engages mysteries of faith and doubt without sacrificing
the lyricism of her language or the suspense of her storyline. Anna
may or may not be a "living marvel," but The Wonder certainly
is
*NPR*
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