On a chilly December night, Dr. Diana Duprey – abortion clinic director, wife of a Colorado DA, and mother to a 19-year-old college freshman – is found brutally murdered in her lap pool, and the terrifying, politically charged hunt for her killer reveals a hornet’s nest of dark secrets.

“What works best in this novel is not the issue of abortion (duly presented and dissected from both sides) nor the revelation of the murderer but the family backstories, which reveal Hyde at her best.”

—Anita Shreve, The Washington Post

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Crazy As Chocolate is the story of two sisters who grew up with a mentally ill mother. As the novel opens, Izzy, the younger sister, is about to turn 41 – a difficult milestone, because when her mother turned 41, she killed herself. “I was about to enter virgin time, the second half of a life unlived, a life my mother never knew.” The novel takes place over the course of that birthday weekend, with visits from her father and her older sister Ellie – who is now going through many of the same problems their mother experienced. The story alternates between present and past, with glimpses of what it was like to grow up with an erratic mother who chronically lied, danced in the rain, cleaned cuts with bleach, and even pushed her beloved Plymouth over a cliff. The car’s engine, after all, had just died.

“Like Anne Tyler, Hyde captures the quirky, heartbreaking core of a character and puts it on the page with shining prose…. Throughout, the author maintains a delicate tension as Izzy comes to terms with her difficult sister’s life and her own guilt about their mother’s suicide, in a novel full of originality and sparkle.”

—Publishers Weekly

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Set in a small New Hampshire town in the year 1971, Monoosook Valley is the story of a thirty-five-year-old woman – and mother of two teenage children – coming out of the deep freeze she’s been in since the untimely death of her husband twelve years earlier.

“With wonderful detail and marvelous dialogue, Hyde (Her Native Colors) expertly chronicles the bittersweet liberation of Shirley Morrison.”

—Publishers Weekly

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Her Native Colors is the story of Phoebe Martin and Molly Adams. Having grown up together in Vermont, the two women have gone their separate ways: Phoebe is now a lawyer with a prestigious San Francisco firm and a divorced mother of a four-year-old boy; Molly has remained in Vermont, teaching school and weaving. Now they are reunited for Molly’s wedding, and while both hope for a warm reunion of old friends, what they experience is the tangle of emotions as they attempt to reconcile themselves to the changes in each other’s life.

“Elisabeth Hyde is a remarkably lucid and authoritative novelist; in fact, her technique of storytelling is so precise and polished that Her Native Colors doesn't resemble a first novel at all-except those rare first novels of equally accomplished grace: Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping or Gloria Naylor's The Women of Brewster Place.”

—John Irving

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