THE WONDER

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 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. Pitting all the seductions of fundamentalism against sense and love, it is a searing examination of what nourishes us, body and soul.