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With all the propulsive tension that made Room an international bestseller, Emma Donoghue’s new masterpiece, The Wonder, is a tale of two strangers who transform each other’s lives. Set in Ireland in the 1850s, an English nurse arrives in a small village to keep watch over a young girl who has been fasting for months and claims to be living only on manna from heaven. Is it a miracle or fraud or something else? Donoghue shares with ALOUD audiences her latest riveting psychological thriller with Ramona Ausubel.
Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an Irish emigrant twice over: she spent eight years in Cambridge doing a Ph.D. in eighteenth-century literature before moving to London, Ontario. She migrates between genres, writing for screen, stage, and radio, as well as historical and contemporary novels and short stories. Her other books include Frog Music, Slammerkin, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, and Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature.
Ramona Ausubel burst onto the literary scene in 2012 with her debut novel No One is Here Except All of Us, earning the love of critics with her inimitable voice and imaginative style, and winning the PEN Center USA Fiction Award and the VCU Cabell First Novel Award, as well as being named a finalist for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. Next came A Guide to Being Born, an enthralling story collection that Aimee Bender declared “fresh, delicate, beautiful, expressive, otherworldly.” Now comes a gorgeous, spellbinding new novel from this rising luminary: Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty.
