What happens at your kitchen table can become the blueprint for everything you are. Did you sit alone or with people you loved? Was it fun or tense? Was someone working hard to stop you noticing someone else's mood? Did you take it for granted, or know someone had busted their balls to make it happen?

Was the food thoughtful and delicious, or bland and functional? Was the plate laid down with love or anger?

It all matters. It all stays with us.

I think about this every single day.

For years, Dawn O’Porter believed that fulfilment lived somewhere glamorous – in success, recognition, and a life lived loudly.

Somewhere between grieving loss, learning to cook something vaguely nutritious, Hollywood dreams, raising children, writing bestselling fiction and eating wotsits for dinner, Dawn discovered that the real spotlight wasn’t out there. It was here, at the kitchen table. In the messy moments, and in the meals burned, devoured, avoided and adored. Food became her stage, her comfort and her love language.

Hungry Eyes is a memoir about identity and appetite. The moments and the meals that quietly shape who we become and the ingredients we use to gradually build a life. She explores the lifelong pressure to ‘bring something to the table’, and the hunger that can create inside us as a result.

Warm, sharp and wise, this is Nigella meets Nora Ephron with a side of therapy and served with a little bit of bite; this will definitely make you want to cook for the ones you love.

What if the thing you’ve been chasing your whole life was already sitting at your kitchen table?