If the Invader Comes

(Paperback)

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A critically acclaimed, Booker longlisted novel that is reminiscent of Pat Barker's 'Regeneration Trilogy'. Clarice Pike and Vic Warren are from completely different backgrounds. An impossible affair has already driven them thousands of miles apart. 1939 finds Clarice in Malaya where her father is an obscure company doctor, and Vic in East London, an unemployed shipwright badly married to Phylis, Clarice's cousin. As their feelings conspire to draw the lovers back together, the world erupts with a terrible violence. It is the relentlessness of male brutality that forces Vic to grope towards what real manhood might be. If the Invader Comes combines themes from Derek Beaven's previously acclaimed Newton's Niece and Acts of Mutiny to portray a wartime England where human relationships are threatened as much from within the family as from occupied Europe. Exciting, moving and ultimately optimistic, Derek Beaven's new novel represents a daring leap in British Fiction.

Reviews

'Offers reminders of Graham Greene's The End of the Affair...[A] powerful, sharply conceived novel' The Times 'The novel's chief strength derives from a pyschological delicacy: a file of scrupulously observed temperaments, ground down by circumstance, expressing themselves in dialogue pitched just on the right side of fracture. Beaven excels, too, in descriptions of physical sensation...All the abilities shown in his excellent second novel, Acts of Mutiny, are well to the fore'. D J Taylor in Independent 'This is the kind of fiction we like... Beaven imagines the war background so completely that you almost forget what actually happened... [he] shows it as clear as a Vermeer mirror.' David Robertson, Scotsman 'Large, deft, prickly and ambitious. Beaven weaves a highly convincing and alarming picture of a country sinking into a state of war. You believe in everything Beaven tells you because his work practically explodes with narrative assurance.' Julie Myerson, Guardian

Author Bio

Derek Beaven is the author of three novels: Newtons Niece was published in 1994, Acts of Mutiny in 1998, If the Invader Comes in 2001 and His Coldest Winter (2005). Newtons Niece was shortlisted for the Writers Guild Best Fiction Book of 1994, and won a Commonwealth Writers Prize for a first novel (Eurasia) 1994/5. Acts of Mutiny was shortlisted for both the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Encore Award. If the Invader Comes was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Derek Beaven lives in Maidenhead, Berkshire.