The luminous first novel by Marya Hornbacher, the acclaimed author of "Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia," is a moving and passionate story of a death from despair -- and a stricken family's passage through grief toward the hope, solace, and understanding that waits for them somewhere beyond the center of winter.

A fascinating, highly unusual, literary novel of love, obsession and powerful women by the author of the highly acclaimed Wasted. 'All the seasons here in the north move toward their own end, except winter, which moves toward its centre and sits there to see how long you can take it.' At the centre of winter, in Motley, Minnesota, Arnold Schiller gives in to the oppressive season that reigns outside and to his own inner demons and commits suicide, leaving a devastated family in his wake. Claire Schiller, wife and mother, takes shelter from the emotional storm with her husband's parents, but must ultimately emerge from her grief and help her two young children to recover. Esau, her oldest, is haunted by the same darkness that plagued his father. At twelve years old, he has already been in and out of state psychiatric hospitals and now, with the help of his mother and sister, he must overcome the forces that drive him deep into himself. But as the youngest, perhaps, it is Kate who carries the heaviest burden. A precocious six-year-old who desperately wants to help her mother hold the family together, she will have to come to terms with the memory of her father who was at once loving and cruel. Narrated alternately by Claire, Katie and Esau, this powerful and passionate novel explores the ways in which both children and adults experience tragic events, discover solace and hope in each other, and survive. The Centre of Winter finds humour in unlikely places and evokes the north - its people and landscape - with warmth, sensitivity and insight. The story of three people who, against all odds, find their way out of the centre of winter, Marya Hornbacher's debut novel will leave you breathless, tearful, and ultimately, inspired.

For those who don't believe in God--or don't know whether they believe--New York Times best-selling author Marya Hornbacher offers an insightful, moving approach to the concept of faith. For those who don't believe in God, feel disconnected from the ideas of God presented in organized religion, or are simply struggling to determine their own spiritual path, Marya Hornbacher, author of the New York Times best sellers Madness and Wasted, offers a down-to-earth exploration of the concept of faith.Many of us have been trained to think of spirituality as the sole provenance of religion; and if we have come to feel that the religious are not the only ones with access to a spiritual life, we may still be casting about for what, precisely, a spiritual life would be, without a God, a religion, or a solid set of spiritual beliefs.In Waiting, best-selling author Marya Hornbacher uses the story of her own journey beginning with her recovery from alcoholism to offer a fresh approach to cultivating a spiritual life. Relinquishing the concept of a universal "Spirit" that exists outside of us, Hornbacher gives us the framework to explore the human spirit in each of us--the very thing that sends us searching, that connects us with one another, the thing that "comes knocking at the door of our emotionally and intellectually closed lives and asks to be let in."When we let it in and only when we do, she says, we begin to be integrated people. And we begin to walk a spiritual path. And there are many points along the way where we stop, or we fumble, or we get tangled up or turned around. Those are the places where we wait.Waiting, you'll discover, can become a kind of spiritual practice in itself, requiring patience, acceptance, and stillness. Sometimes we do it because we know we need to, though we may not know why. In short, we do it on faith.Marya Hornbacher is the author of two best-selling nonfiction titles, Madness: A Bipolar Life and Wasted: A Memoir of Anorexia and Bulimia. She has also authored a recovery handbook, Sane: Mental Illness, Addiction, and the 12 Steps, and a critically acclaimed novel, The Center of Winter.

Why would a talented young woman enter into a torrid affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Through five lengthy hospital stays, endless therapy, and the loss of family, friends, jobs, and all sense of what it means to be "normal," Marya Hornbacher lovingly embraced her anorexia and bulimia -- until a particularly horrifying bout with the disease in college put the romance of wasting away to rest forever. A vivid, honest, and emotionally wrenching memoir, "Wasted" is the story of one woman's travels to reality's darker side -- and her decision to find her way back on her own terms.

'WASTED' Marya Hornbacher
Coming back from an addiction to starvation
"I would do anything to keep people from going where
I went. This book was the only thing I could think of."

"A stunning original and beautifully written book gouging deep into a gruesome subject which, by comparison, other writers have merely flirted with."
KATIE CAMPBELL, 'Evening Standard'

"This factual account of a 23-year-old's experience of anorexia and bulimia is not just another confessional. It has not been written as an act of therapy or for financial gain. It is a prose poem. This does not detract from its painful force nor from the author's searing intelligence (one has to keep reminding oneself that she is only 23) but rather adds to the force of her communication …Like Plath she writes with a metaphoric intensity which at times seems tragically indistinguishable from the power of her drive to self-destruct. Her brutal honesty and her lack of special pleading, only adds to the essential pain of the book. If you want to understand anorexia, read this book."
ALICE THOMPSON, 'The Scotsman'

"The mind of Hornbacher is sharper than were her collar-bones when she weighed 4 stone, was given a week to live, and suddenly decided not to die. It is her 23-year-old body that was wasted by 14 years of anorexia and bulimia. Her true story is painfully honest, analytical, complex and sad: compulsive reading."
'Harpers & Queen'

"A brilliant moving memoir"
TOBIAS JONES, 'Frank'

"What marks 'WASTED' out is the quality of the voice. Hornbacher is, simply, a good writer. Her gift for description makes even the familiar aspects of the phenomenon newly real. She is coolly vivid on the sheer violence of anorexia. There's an edge to her prose …successfully catching a young woman's desperate desire to counter the cultural voice that tells her she's "too much, too much, too much." 'WASTED' will be of value not only to fellow sufferers: any woman who has ever been made to feel gleeful by the diminishing of her physical self will gain from reading this painful and sharp-boned account."
SYLVIA BROWNRIGG, 'Guardian'