LIFE AT A GLANCE

BORN
South London 1947

EDUCATED
Attended eight schools in England and in Australia - including Ashlyns, an experimental comprehensive in Hertfordshire - and read English at St Peter's College, Oxford University.

CAREER
After university, taught English at a grammar school and then trained in Movement and Drama at the Laban Centre, London. Worked briefly with a small opera company. Returned to teaching at a college, tutoring English and Drama. Now writes full time.

LIVES
Berkshire, UK. Married - 2 grown-up children

BOOKS
Remake (2024)
Newton's Niece
(1994)
Acts of Mutiny (1998)
If the Invader Comes (2001)
His Coldest Winter (2005)
The Icon Painter (2014)
Pharmakon (2015)

AWARDS
Derek Beaven won a Commonwealth Writer's Prize for Newton's Niece, which was also shortlisted for the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Book.
Acts of Mutiny shortlisted for both the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Encore Award.
If the Invader Comes longlisted for the Booker Prize.

 

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About The Book

His Coldest Winter by Derek Beaven

If Alan finds himself captivated by Cynthia, someone else is equally preoccupied with her—Geoffrey, a young scientist who happens to work with Alan’s father in the race to develop the microchip. Alan, Geoffrey and Cynthia become linked by a web of secrets which, while the country remains suspended in ice, threatens everything they ever trusted.

His Coldest Winter is the book of mine so far that doesn’t seek to account for itself as a document. In one sense, it’s a straight third person Cold War Spy Thriller. And yet, in another, it’s a teenage Love Story structured closely on Romeo and Juliet. It also has a small Science Fiction element that attempts to read outwards from some visions under an electron microscope in order to redesign our assumptions about the nature of plot. These features make the story strange and intriguing, I hope.

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Reviews

‘A wonderful book … very moving’ Rosie Boycott on BBC Radio 4

‘Gripping’ Sunday Express

‘With wonderful imaginative intensity, expressed in an original style of elliptical impressionism galvanised by sudden realistic shocks, Derek Beaven uses an austere background to dramatize a story of the rivalry of young love, the rivalry of ton-up motorcycle gangs, and the rivalry of international industrial espionage of military urgency … An ingenious, multi-layered novel.’ Sunday Telegraph

‘One of our most uncompromisingly individual novelists’ Guardian

‘This is a fine novel that achieves an extraordinary exactitude of feeling matched by a perfect sense of place.’ Jane Housham Guardian (on the paperback edition)

‘An oblique, suggestive, estranging book that knits together sex, treachery, Cold War politics and hard science.’ Literary Review

‘A master of evoking atmosphere … Beaven writes about physical surroundings and physical sensations with absolute clarity and a poetically oblique manner.’ Sunday Business Post

‘A cold weather, Cold War thriller’ Telegraph

His Coldest Winter by Derek Beaven is available from Amazon

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