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 . . . n n Set in the Irish Midlands in the 1850s, Emma Donoghues 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 childs 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. n