The Wonder follows the mystery of a devout Irish girl who remains healthy after fasting for several months, and the English nurse charged with determining whether the girl is a miracle or a hoax.

Nominated for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the latest novel by the acclaimed author of Room is inspired by "fasting girls" in Europe and North America between the 16th and 20th centuries. Emma Donoghue takes us through the process of writing the book, including the very present-day concerns at its core.

"At least 20 years ago, I came across one of the 50 true cases of 'fasting girls' [between the 16th and 20th century] and I was transfixed with curiosity. It took so long for me to find a way in: because no one of the real 'fasting girls' cases was quite right for my purposes, I kept setting the idea aside until it finally occurred to me (duh!) to make up a fictional story about the phenomenon.

"The decision to let it be pure fiction freed me to set it in mid-19th century Ireland, in the shadow of the Irish potato famine, and to find some light in the darkness."

"Some of my biggest influences included Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing; my thoughtful nine-year-old daughter; the hunger strikes (in some cases to death) of Irish Republican prisoners in 1981; the sodden bogland landscape of Ireland; a friend whose daughter struggles with anorexia; and the Catholic hymns, prayers and scriptures of my childhood.

"To help organize the book, I rely on Scrivener, a writing program for Apple that lets me keep all the research materials, ideas, character and setting notes and scenes organized, so I can find what I need with ease.

"I always find the editing process interesting, but this time around I feel particularly grateful to several people (my U.S. agent Kathy Anderson and my Canadian publisher Iris Tupholme) who made crucial suggestions on how to tighten and twist the plot in the third draft. You're so close to it at that point, it's hard to see what's there and what's still just in your mind's eye, so their clarity was invaluable."

"I didn't skip a single meal as research, because I figured that would tell me nothing about the physiology and psychology of long-term fasting; I just did a lot of research. And so much of what I was researching turned out to be not just 'back then' but 'right now' too. (A 13-year-old Jain girl just died in India after a 68-day fast.)

"While writing, I might be tramping along on my treadmill desk; curled up on a sofa; in hotel rooms, on publicity tours; on the train to visit the Room shoot during filming; in the car, waiting for my kids to finish a class. Cafés, airplanes... I couldn't care less where my body is while my mind is falling down the rabbit hole that is my laptop."