Glowingly reviewed everywhere from O, The Oprah Magazine and Good Housekeeping to sites across the blogosphere, Lydia’s Party sparks “a-ha” moments and heartfelt conversations about friendship, regrets, and ambitions. Margaret Hawkins’s earlier books, all published by small presses, have gained her a devoted following, but this gem of a novel will introduce her to the wider audience she deserves.

 

Lydia is hosting her “Bleak Midwinter Bash,” a late Christmas party that has become an annual tradition. Her guests—six friends who bonded twenty years ago over art, dogs, and their budding careers and romances—think they know everything about one another, but tonight Lydia prepares to shock them with a devastating announcement.

 

"I didn't speak until I was seven. I didn't feel the need," May tells us on one page of How to Survive a Natural Disaster, a story of family rivalry, betrayal, violence and forgiveness told in six voices. May, the strange, silent orphan brought to a leafy suburb north of Chicago at six months old to mend the lives of a troubled family, might not talk, but as her Grandma Jack observes, "That baby studies people."

Next we hear from May's parents, her sister, her dog and Phoebe, their agoraphobic neighbor who is the one who finally must rise to the occasion when May decides to take matters into their own hands.

As each character makes a case for his or own side of the story the reader learns that blood ties aren't what make a family and that sometimes survival is only possible through forgiveness.

 

Margaret Hawkins spent her girlhood dazzled by her vivacious, highachieving sister, Barb. Younger than Barb by eleven years, Margaret saw her sister as the star of her family. And no wonder. Barb's high school years were filled with achievement inside and outside of the classroom. After college, Barb married a charming young professor, Karim Shallal, and embraced living abroad with him, when he was offered a full professorship at Basra University in Iraq. That was in 1971.

 

In three years, everything changed. As Margaret Hawkins writes in her new book, How We Got Barb Back: The Story of My Sister's Reawakening after 30 Years of Schizophrenia, "On a promising day in 1974, my family's life blew up. That was the day my beautiful, bright, and very American older sister returned from Iraq. Something had changed during those years she was gone, and the Barb we knew never really returned. That Barb had vanished, and though her husband tried to bring her home, she was already gone."

 

Unimaginable as it might seem, for the next 32 years Barb went undiagnosed and untreated. How We Got Barb Back recounts the story of those years and the steps Margaret Hawkins took to bring her sister back from the depths of crippling mental illness. This story of sisterly love is both full of surprises and profoundly inspiring.

 

What happens when nothing happens? Maryanne wonders in A Year of Cats and Dogs, a darkly funny yet hopeful novel about a woman in midlife who feels surrounded by death. She answers her own question by deciding to find out.

 

"I wanted to embrace entropy, to stop working so hard at keeping things up, to go AWOL from the productive world I d so long been a part of, she tells us at the beginning of the novel. The clearer it became that Phillip wasn t coming back the more I wanted to hurry up and let things go just to see what would happen."

 

As it turns out, a lot happens. Even as Maryanne's world slows down and comes apart, curious revelations begin to emerge about the daily life she's formerly taken for granted. She discovers she can hear the thoughts of animals, starting with her own opinionated dog and cat. Then the veterinarian at the animal shelter where she volunteers offers her a job as a dog whisperer and asks her on a date to his mother s funeral. When her father falls ill she is reunited with her estranged sister and when he dies they learn about his secret life.

 

The book contains recipes for the consoling, if plain, foods Maryanne cooks for her family and friends, along with the inner dialog that accompanies them, and each chapter is linked to a corresponding chapter in the I Ching, reflecting that book's age-old wisdom that says that sometimes no action is the best action of all.