Welcome to My Favourite Reads, the blog series where I share with you the fab books I’ve read over the past month.

Or not.

I read two books in May. TWO! And one of those was an author buddy’s draft manuscript, which means, as wonderful as it was, I can’t share a thing about it.

Sigh. I’m not sure why I had such a poo month. It just kind of happened. We’ve been busy, sure, but I usually find time to read regardless. I mean, I LOVE reading. So how can it not happen?

A think little of the blame must go to my new cookbook, RecipeTin Eats: Dinner by Nagi Maehashi. I’ve been poring over it, marking up recipes and testing them out, thinking about adaptions, grabbing out other cookbooks and comparing ingredients and methods. It’s a wonderful cookbook and I love how each recipe has a QR code that takes you to a video of Nagi making the dish. So clever and something all cookbooks should have. No wonder it won the ABIA’s Book of the Year award. It’s a cracker.

Anyway, here’s the solitary favourite read I can tell you about.

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Sundial by Catriona Ward

I read Catriona Ward’s debut novel The Last House on Needless Street last year and loved it (my thoughts on that here). It was strange and compelling and unexpected, and became a bit of a hit release. It was a no-brainer to buy Sundial. I can’t even remember reading the blurb. I just saw and bought.

If The Last House on Needless Street was unexpected, Sundial was even more so. This is an incredibly twisty and disturbing story. I guess you’d call it a gothic thriller? Not sure, whatever the genre it’s fantastically written and very hard to put down.

No one is to be trusted in this book. The characters are amazing – hugely complex and heavy with secrets – and the Mojave Desert setting vividly drawn. As for Sundial, the property where Rob, the main protagonist, was brought up, it’s… I don’t know. Weird. Beautiful. Haunted. Not a place I’d like to visit.

Ward’s next book will be an auto-buy too.

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What have you read lately that you’d like to shout about?

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