The Invaders - Hardcover

Waclawiak, Karolina

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1941393292 ISBN 13: 9781941393291

Publisher: Regan Arts., 2015

Synopsis

"Cheryl is both devious and complicated... Her interloper perspective allows for bold reflections--knowing that she 'could have ended up somewhere where people had good reason to be unhappy.'" - The New Yorker
 

"A perfect, and perfectly dark, beach read." - Vanity Fair

"John Cheever and John Updike were once the rulers of American suburban fiction; in Bullet Park, The Swimmer and Couples they outlined a portrait of the middlebrow milquetoast within the post-60s New Left. Waclawiak writes of the suburban rituals of status and boredom with the same acuity for detail as those writers, but the domestic setting she creates around Cheryl and Teddy is a thoroughly post-millennial world, the kind prophesied by Jean Baudrillard when he quipped, 'What do we do after the orgy?'" - The Guardian

"Karolina Waclawiak's The Invaders isn't about a family as much as it is about people who are deeply committed to their own destruction... An elegant book about the difficulty of casting off who you've been and who you've become." - Slate

"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." - O, The Oprah Magazine)

Over 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 faultlines through our culture, threatening to pitch bored housewives, pill-popping children, and suspicious neighbors headlong into the suburban abyss.

About this title

About the Author

Karolina Waclawiak (pronounced Vahts-Slav-iak) received her BFA in Screenwriting from USC School of Cinematic Arts and her MFA in Fiction from Columbia University. Her first novel, How To Get Into The Twin Palms, was published by Two Dollar Radio in 2012. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, The Rumpus, and The Believer (where she is also an editor). She lives in Los Angeles.

Edition details

• Publisher: Regan Arts.
• Publication date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1941393292
• ISBN 13: 9781941393291
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240