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.