Sundial
from the author of Sunday Times bestseller The Last House on Needless Street
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4.2 • 70 Ratings
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- £3.49
Publisher Description
'DO NOT MISS THIS BOOK' - STEPHEN KING
'Creepy, individual and gripping' - IAN RANKIN
'A thrilling hall of mirrors filled with twists' - ALEX MICHAELIDES
'Brilliant and moving' - SARAH PINBOROUGH
Rob is afraid of her daughter.
Callie collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends, and Rob is afraid of what she might to do Annie, her younger sister. She sees a darkness in Callie that reminds her of the family she left behind, and a life she has tried to forget.
Seeing no other way to keep Annie safe, she decides to take Callie back to Sundial, her childhood home deep in the Mojave Desert. And there she will have to make a terrible choice.
Callie is afraid of her mother.
Rob has begun to look at her strangely. To tell her secrets about her past that both disturb and excite her.
And they are both afraid that only one of them will make it back from Sundial alive...
A gripping gothic masterpiece from the bestselling and award-winning author of THE LAST HOUSE ON NEEDLESS STREET, SUNDIAL is a must-read for fans of GIRL A and SHARP OBJECTS.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Something deeply unsettling occurs in almost every scene of Catriona Ward’s trippy modern gothic. In the book’s opening chapters, we are introduced to “Rob the teacher who lives in the suburbs with [her] handsome sciencey professor husband” and the couple’s two young daughters, Annie and Callie. Rob and Irving’s marriage is a horror show of resentments, infidelity and cruelty; their older daughter, Callie, “likes to talk about murder at breakfast.” Fearing for her frail younger daughter’s safety—and eager to get away from Irving—Rob whisks away Callie to her childhood home in the bleak California desert, where things get even more sinister. As she did with her bestseller The Last House on Needless Street, Ward proves herself to be a master of weirdness and ominous suspense with a keen sense of the way trauma reverberates through a life. We couldn’t put Sundial down, even though we were frightened of what secrets were about to be unearthed.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With this masterful horror novel, Ward (The Last House on Needless Street) weaves a seething, hallucinatory tale of family, death, and hereditary trauma that will keep readers guessing all the way to the devastating conclusion. Rob has spent years distancing herself from Sundial, her enigmatic childhood home nestled deep in the Mojave Desert, finding comfort and normalcy in playing the role of dutiful wife and mother of two. But when her haunted, volatile daughter, Callie, shows signs that she might be heir to the horrors that Rob has spent so long trying to escape, Rob and Callie must venture back into the Mojave to exorcise the ghosts of Rob's past before they destroy her family's future. Ward's brilliance lies in how she explicates the innate bizarreness of a child's experience of the world and explores the small cruelties that families are uniquely capable of visiting upon one another through intimacies accumulated and treated as ammunition. The queasy narrative gives its characters plenty of space to explore their unreal circumstances without ever sacrificing momentum, and while the ending skillfully ties together the many threads, it never offers easy answers. This is a must-read for fans of gothic literature and taut psychological thrillers.
Customer Reviews
Great read!
This was an enthralling novel. Well written, believable characters and a shocker of an ending I didn’t see coming. A must read. Highly recommended 🙌🏻
10/10
Loved it! Thought provoking, moving and frightening.
Would definitely recommend
Will blow your mind
an extremely emotive novel that will stay with me for a long time.