The Invaders

by Karolina Waclawiak Narrated by Bernadette Dunne

Overview

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

Editorial Reviews

The New Yorker

As Cheryl, a trophy wife, and her entitled stepson, Teddy, follow parallel paths to self-destruction, the book draws out the disjunction between a lush, decorous setting and the inner corruption of its inhabitants.

Booklist

"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."

Vanity Fair

"...ought to be sold with coconut oil and sunglasses—a perfect, and perfectly dark, beach read told with L.A.-noir style but set in tony country-club Connecticut."

The Toast - Anna Andersen

…my favorite kind of beach read, more messy ambiguity than Mai Tais.

Friendship - Emily Gould

How To Get Into the Twin Palms was a mini-masterpiece of atmosphere and mood; a new book is a cause for celebration.

Bad Feminist and An Untamed State - Roxane Gay

The Invaders is an elegant, ominous book, a sharp, witty novel of manners of the most sinister kind. In Waclawiak’s expert hands, this novel will have you holding your breath and your heart until the very last word.

Green Girl - Kate Zambreno

A witty, vicious, and entirely moving portrait of privilege, alienation, and sexual invisibility set in a Connecticut beach community.

The Isle of Youth and Find Me - Laura van den Berg

A wonderfully fierce novel, from a brilliant and essential talent.

The Vacationers and Laura Lamont's Life in Pictures - Emma Straub

The Invaders is as crisp as they come, hilarious and alarming in equal measure. This book is a time bomb in madras shorts, ready for golf, sex, and natural disasters.

The Middlesteins - Jami Attenberg

Karolina Waclawiak’s The Invaders is the stiffest of literary drinks—it’ll jolt your system, and make the world around you glow a little differently when you’re done with it. Witty, dark, and honest, this novel tells the hard—but hilarious—truths about aging in America, dysfunctional relationships, and suburban vices.

Dare Me - Megan Abbott

A blazing wonder of a novel . . . As whip-smart and cunning as it is poignant and mysterious, The Invaders demonstrates that Waclawiak’s masterful debut novel, How to Get into the Twin Palms, was just the beginning.

Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead - Sara Gran

Seamlessly blending literary and genre traditions, Karolina Waclawiak never fails to surprise, delight, and reveal secrets that lesser writers keep hidden. I love her work, and I'm already waiting for the next book.

The Leftovers and Little Children - Tom Perrotta

The Invaders is a gut punch of a novel—a scathing look at privileged people trapped by their own choices, but unable to imagine an alternative to their misery. Karolina Waclawiak is a remarkable writer, able to channel the unflinching clarity of Richard Yates, the off-kilter tenderness of Cheever, and taut narrative energy of crime fiction in a voice that is all her own.

Kirkus Reviews

2015-04-04
Twisted, depressed characters are up to no good in a tony East Coast beach town. "Each time they put up big white signs welcoming people to LITTLE NECK COVE, A CONNECTICUT BEACH ENCLAVE, they were set on fire or spray-painted. The new homes that were being built on Spruce were vandalized. Everyone thought it was townies....But it wasn't them. It was us: me, Joe, Steven, Chucky, and Rob. That's what was so funny. It was us all along—their own children doing it to them." This is Teddy speaking, one of two unlikable narrators of this creepy story of suburban dysfunction and violence. Just kicked out of Dartmouth, Teddy has rolled home to live with his father, Jeffrey, and stepmother, Cheryl, a much younger retail clerk Jeffrey married after ditching Teddy's mother—who fell drunkenly to her death off a pier a few months later. In any case, folks are not welcoming anyone to Little Neck Cove anymore. As the story opens, the two-dimensional country-club ladies who populate the "enclave" are throwing fits about the local men who come to fish from the rocks each morning. Once aggressive measures are taken to keep out these potential intruders, who are in fact totally harmless, Little Neck's denizens are hemmed in by a massive, gleaming white fence. Behind it, things go south as the bored, drunk, pill-popping head cases of the community torment, maim, and sexually harass each other. Subtly edged out and ostracized by the other women, abandoned by her husband, haunted by her past, Cheryl becomes increasingly alienated and unmoored and rushes, in her muffled and deadpan way, toward the story's apocalyptic denouement. This would-be dark comedy of manners will be too dark for some.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940192632833
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	07/07/2015
Edition description:	Unabridged

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