Emma Donoghue · 2016 · overland

Emma Donoghue's 2016 novel, set in the Irish Midlands in 1859, in the long shadow of the Famine. Lib Wright, an English nurse trained by Florence Nightingale in the Crimea, is hired and sent to a remote village to keep a two-week watch over Anna O'Donnell, an eleven-year-old girl said to have survived for months without food, a so-called fasting girl drawing pilgrims and sceptics alike. The route follows Lib's journey from London to the dead centre of Ireland.

1. 1
   London

   A no-nonsense English nurse, veteran of Florence Nightingale's Crimean hospitals, Lib Wright is engaged for a strange commission and leaves London by the night train westward.

2. 2
   Holyhead

   At Holyhead, the end of the Welsh railway, she boards the mail packet for the crossing of the Irish Sea.

3. 3
   Dublin

   She lands in Dublin and is carried on by jaunting car into the bogs and small fields of the Irish Midlands.

4. 4
   An Irish Midlands Village

   In a poor, unnamed village she takes up her watch over Anna O'Donnell, the fasting girl whose survival without food she has come either to expose or to witness.