For this week's cookbook review, Donna Hay arrives with Sunshine, Lemons and Sea Salt: A Celebration of Modern Coastal Home Cooking, one of the most anticipated cookbooks of the year. Drawn from her life on the Australian coast, this is Hay at her most relaxed and, arguably, her most beautiful.
The premise is clear from the title: coastal, seasonal, generous food made for sharing. What the book delivers is that premise executed with the visual confidence and recipe precision that have made Donna Hay one of the world's most recognisable cookbook authors. If you have read our Donna Hay: The Fast Five review, you already know what to expect in terms of reliability and presentation. This book takes those same qualities and opens them up into something more expansive.
The book moves through the day rather than through courses. Golden sunrise breakfasts, ricotta eggs with basil oil and slow-cooked tomatoes with feta, give way to beachy lunches of mint salsa verde potato and chicken salad. Dinners include chipotle honey salmon tacos with pickled onions and whatever else feels right when the day has been long and the table is full. Desserts lean toward coconut and lime panna cotta and fruit-forward things that taste unambiguously like summer.
It is a book about mood as much as method. The sections do not feel arbitrary; they reflect how people actually eat when the days are long and the food is meant to be easy. Hay also includes party menus throughout, making the book as useful for a gathering as for a weeknight.
Donna Hay has always had the gift of making recipes feel approachable without making them feel simple. That distinction matters more in Sunshine, Lemons and Sea Salt than in most cookbooks, because the aesthetic is so effortless that it would be easy to assume the food requires less thought than it does. It does not.
The ingredient list leans toward citrus, fresh herbs, grilled proteins, and cold things. The kind of pantry that assembles itself when the season cooperates. The recipe range is genuinely broad: party menus for a crowd, weeknight meals that take thirty minutes, things you would serve at a proper table and things you would eat standing up at a kitchen counter. Every recipe feels achievable. None of them feel like a compromise.
No review of a Donna Hay book is complete without accounting for the photography, and here it is as strong as it has ever been. The Australian coastal light that runs through the book gives everything a warmth and clarity that is specific to place and time of year. The table settings are inviting without being precious. The food looks like food rather than architecture.
This is food that looks genuinely pleasurable to eat, and Hay has a particular talent for making a finished dish seem like something you could actually put on your own table tonight. That quality, more than anything, is what keeps her books in regular use rather than on a shelf.
Sunshine, Lemons and Sea Salt is Donna Hay at the height of her powers. It has a clear sense of purpose: to make coastal, seasonal, convivial food feel as natural as the setting it comes from. And it succeeds, fully and beautifully.
A perfect house gift, a summer staple, and a book you will reach for whenever you want food that feels like a good day. Our full recommendation.
Sunshine, Lemons and Sea Salt is Donna Hay at the height of her powers: sun-drenched, generous, and one of the most beautiful cookbooks of 2026.
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