Read an extract of Natural Disaster by Lisa Owens
For weeks, she has been saying it will be their special day. One last, perfect day with her children before she returns to work after maternity leave. What’s the worst that can happen?
Unfolding across 24 hours, Natural Disaster is a novel about the absurd, frustrating, hilarious, precarious, bittersweet, sometimes astonishing challenge – literal, existential – of being a woman, a mother, a wife, a person for one single, entire day.
‘Hilarious, brilliant, utterly exhilarating’ MONICA ALI
‘Funny, sharp unputdownable’ NINA STIBBE
‘Fantastic’ JESSIE BURTON
‘Very funny and very, very relatable’ STYLIST, 2026 BEST FICTION PICKS
‘I absolutely loved it’ LUCY DIAMOND
‘Compulsive, agonising, and hilarious’ CHRIS POWER
‘Brilliant, hilarious, gut-punchingly truth-telling’ EMILY ITAMI
‘The funniest novel I’ve read in years’ CLAIRE POWELL
‘Thunderously good’ NATHAN FILER
‘I did not give Lisa Owens permission to look inside my very soul but she seems to have done it anyway. Smart, wise and real’ CLAIRE LYNCH
‘A genuinely dazzling novel’ DAVID WHITEHOUSE
‘This is the book I’ve been waiting for ever since I had children. So propulsive I read it in a single sitting’ MARIANNE LEVY
‘Destined to become a classic’ JESSICA STANLEY
‘What a perfect depiction of early motherhood, womanhood, and love’ OLIVIA POTTS
‘I absolutely adored it.’ EMMA HUGHES
‘Generous, funny, heartbreaking and clever’ LIZZY STEWART
On the way to the library, Felix begins petitioning for a ‘panno chocklit’ when he realises their route will take them past the expensive bakery they started going to as a treat but which has inevitably spiralled into every time they pass. She is about to refuse, then remembering her rule, catches herself – plus, she wouldn’t say no to a coffee.
‘Sure, you can share one with Roo.’
‘But I want my ooooooown one,’ Felix says.
‘You never eat a whole one.’
‘I will eat it all, I promise!’
‘I’m not spending £6 on pastries, and that’s the end of it.’
‘Fine! I won’t have any then!’ Felix shouts, dismounting and shoving his bike on the ground. She parks the buggy outside and with furious calm, moves the bike from the middle of the pavement, before unbuckling Rudy, determined not to get drawn into something. She could have just kept striding past, no café stop, but then she would be modelling capricious, godlike wrath – better surely, to stick to her word (and she really does want that coffee).
Felix glowers by the door while she orders, trying to stifle the building irritation. This isn’t part of the deal! The reason you end up spending a fortune on baked goods and milky drinks with young children is to pass the time in a cosy carbohydrate cocoon, but if there’s so much dark energy roiling while you sip your coffee, where is the pleasure in that?
‘Do you want a fluffy milk, Fee?’ she asks cheerfully, but he refuses to look at her, issuing instead a devastating little head shake.
‘Actually,’ she says to the server, ‘make that two pains au chocolat, please.’
Felix does have the good grace to look sheepish. ‘Fank you, Mumma,’ he says, accepting the whole, huge pastry in both hands. She gives the other to Rudy and they sit at one of the tables outside, where it takes monumental effort not to tell Felix to sit properly (he is half- standing, half- perched on the very edge of the metal chair, tipping forward so it’s only on two front legs, then releasing every so often, letting it clatter gratingly onto the pavement) while she drinks her coffee around Rudy, who is on her lap.
Felix begins to tell her an anecdote from nursery – a vanishingly rare occurrence. He is usually Fort Knox where this realm of his life is concerned, ignoring even the most tentative ventures into how his day was, and any hint of eagerness or interest on her part makes him instantly shut down. She has learned the best way to extract information is by asking low- stakes, fact- based questions (‘Who did you sit next to at lunch?’, ‘Was Zakariya back today?’, ‘Did anyone go on time out?’) in hopes these nuggets might prompt further intel, but often she’s completely ignored, or furnished with the scantest details that even she, skilled in tenuous extrapolation, struggles to make much of. This particular story concerns a child named Bruno, who, while painting,
‘. . . ate a spunch.’
‘A what?’
‘Spunch.’
‘Sponge?’
‘That’s what I said!’
‘A whole sponge?’
‘Not all of it. A few bites.’
When information is ever volunteered, it tends to be similarly outlandish: the time Petra ‘made a flood’ by pouring sand down the toilet, or when Jethro ‘putted tissues in the fish tank’ (the following day, the nursery announced the passing of the two goldfish, Thunder and Lightning, remaining reticent on the cause of their untimely death) or the memorable lunchtime, still talked about in awed tones among Felix and his friends, when Amaya sneezed out ‘basgetti’. How astonishing and destabilising to be four – no wonder he emerges at pick- up so tight- lipped, no wonder it takes time to process what goes on in there, when at any moment your colleague might start eating a sponge or evacuate a tendril of spaghetti from their nose!
Once the sponge saga has concluded (the presiding grownup had told everyone ‘the spunches aren’t for food’), Felix starts darting little glances between her and his almost untouched pain au chocolat, with a pinched, unhappy expression.
‘What’s up?’ she asks lightly, knowing full well what is coming.
‘You’re going to be angry . . .’
‘Do you not want it after all?’
Several slow, sorrowful turns of the head. ‘My tummy’s a bit full still.’ She lifts her chin to the sky and exhales very slowly, then puts the pastry back in the paper bag. ‘I’m sorry Mumma.’
‘No need to be sorry. I brought that one on myself. Shall we go?’
As she buckles Rudy in, he hands her back his pastry too, also largely intact despite his hair and clothes being liberally dredged in flakes; this she adds to the paper bag, and buries it deep in a tote in the buggy’s undercarriage.
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