An eleven-year-old girl stops eating but miraculously remains alive and well. A nurse is sent to investigate whether she is a fraud and encounters a journalist who is 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 16th and 20th centuries - is a psychological thriller about a child's murder that threatens to unfold in slow motion before our eyes. It pits all the temptations of fundamentalism against reason and love, and is a burning inquiry into what nourishes us, body and soul.