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Shop nowThe Invaders
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Learn moreOver the course of a summer in a wealthy Connecticut community, a forty-something woman and her college-age stepson’s lives fall apart in a series of violent shocks.
Cheryl has never been the right kind of country-club wife. She’s always felt like an outsider, and now, in her mid-forties—facing the harsh realities of aging while her marriage disintegrates and her troubled stepson, Teddy, is kicked out of college—she feels cast adrift by the sparkling seaside community of Little Neck Cove, Connecticut. So when Teddy shows up at home just as a storm brewing off the coast threatens to destroy the precarious safe haven of the cove, she joins him in an epic downward spiral.
The Invaders, a searing follow-up to Karolina Waclawiak’s critically acclaimed debut novel, How to Get into the Twin Palms, casts a harsh light on the glossy sheen of even the most “perfect” lives in America’s exclusive beach communities. With sharp wit and dark humor, The Invaders exposes the lies and insecurities that run like fault lines through our culture, threatening to pitch bored housewives, pill-popping children, and suspicious neighbors headlong into the suburban abyss.
Karolina Waclawiak is the author of the novels How to Get into the Twin Palms and The Invaders. Formerly an editor at The Believer, she is the executive editor of culture at BuzzFeed News. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Hazlitt, and elsewhere.
Bernadette Dunne, winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards, studied at the Royal National Theatre in London and the Studio Theater in Washington, DC. She lives in Brooklyn.
Reviews
“A scathing look at privileged people trapped by their own choices but unable to imagine an alternative to their misery.”
“A blazing wonder of a novel…As whip smart and cunning as it is poignant and mysterious.”
“A perfect, and perfectly dark, beach read told with LA-noir style but set in tony country-club Connecticut.”
“Fiercely witty…The Invaders chronicles what happens when one woman risks looking beyond the manicured lawns and cozy cottages to consider what her life has become…With deft humor and insight, Waclawiak reveals her characters’ long-hidden vulnerabilities. The Invaders asks us to contemplate what happens to people’s hearts when their lives are lived on the surface. What happens to love?”
“Waclawiak writes about the power of sexual currency and what happens to a woman’s identity when she begins to feel sexually invisible.”
“Waclawiak’s novel exposes the underpinnings of Little Neck Cove for what they are: paltry, superficial façades that poorly mask any semblance of charity, tolerance, or humanity…With its spot-on characterizations, droll dialogue, and staccato pacing, Waclawiak’s dark satire is a trenchant indictment of the country-club set tempered by compassionately rendered portraits of two of its not entirely unwitting victims.”
“Witty, dark, and honest, this novel tells the hard—but hilarious—truths about aging in America, dysfunctional relationships, and suburban vices.”
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