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Set in Australia, The Last Woman in the World takes place in the aftermath of pandemics and devastating fires. What were Rob and Jack’s parents trying to do with their strange experiments? What, or who, is Callie seeing when she talks to her imaginary pals? How far will Rob go to keep her daughters safe, and where is the danger really coming from? Sundial is disturbing and yet ultimately moving as the bonds of love become clear.

It means to be confronted with a thought so vast, dark and monstrous that it will not fit into any known shapes in our mind.”Īs she slowly exposes evil, Ward wrongfoots the reader at every turn. They are resistant to an idea,” says Rob. “When people say something is ‘unthinkable’, what they usually mean is that they don’t want to think it. Moving between perspectives, we see the world through the eyes of Callie, who talks to imaginary friends and wonders who she can trust through the eyes of Rob, as she confronts the horrors of her past and tries to stop them playing out in the present, and through the eyes of Jack, too, Rob’s sister. When Rob returns, she finds the “desert thoughts” that she had concealed with the trappings of everyday life – “spice racks and my daughters and herbaceous borders, cocktails with neighbours and PTA meetings” – start to spill out, and the person she had kept “walled… up, sealed… off in the dark” starts to emerge. Ward captures beauty and dread in the endless sand and heat of Rob’s former home, where “desert light falls over distant mountains, the land grows dim, spread out like a dirty coyote pelt under the sky”, where “all that space gets in your head, makes your thoughts go crazy”. It is, again, terrifying, and shocking in its exploration of what humans will do to one another and the stains left by childhood trauma. Sundial is Catriona Ward’s fourth novel, following the excellent Rawblood and Little Eve, and the bestselling blend of thriller and horror that was The Last House on Needless Street. Ward captures beauty and dread in the endless sand and heat of Rob’s former home When something terrible nearly happens to Rob’s younger daughter, Annie, she blames Callie and decides she needs to take her away, back to her childhood home of Sundial, surrounded by miles of chain link fence, deep in the Mojave desert. She also likes to play, secretly, with small bones and talk to things that aren’t there. But it never quite works: Irving is boiling over with anger, and Callie, the couple’s elder child, likes to talk about murder at breakfast. Teacher Rob is trying to live a normal life, in suburban America, with her beloved daughters and husband, Irving.