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
If the Invader Comes suggests an out-and-out Second World War story. Yet for much of the novel we stay away from the typical scenes of the war itself and look instead at parallel kinds of invaders, domestic battles and ‘war crimes’ that are personal. It is only in the last part that Vic Warren, the working class central character, finally goes into battle with the D-Day landings. This book’s broad geographical sweep takes in the dying days of the British Empire in Malaya, London in the Blitz, the ‘Plotland’ settlements in Essex and the air war over the beautiful ‘Constable Country’ of Suffolk. It is an expansive, moving story of love under extreme pressure.
Reviews
‘Large, deft, prickly and ambitious. His work practically explodes with narrative assurance.’ Julie Myerson Guardian
‘A grand love story, tenderly written, that does justice to the huge subject of war by showing us the often terrible, sometimes magnificent, effects it has on small lives.’ Alison Rowatt Herald
‘Vic and Clarice are not asking much, simply to be together. Yet with the intensifying horror around them, plus the burden of their own secrets and deceits, that simple ambition tests them both in this powerful, sharply conceived novel.’ Dominic Bradbury The Times
‘Beaven has a gift for creating insistently human individuals who prove to be illuminating under pressure … a fine engagement with the largest and smallest details of what it is to be English.’ Lavinia Greenlaw Times Literary Supplement
‘He gives us all the uncertainty, liveliness, rumours and unheroic struggles of the present … as clear as a Vermeer mirror.’ David Robertson The Scotsman
‘A remarkable feat of the imagination.’ Francis King Literary Review
If the Invader Comes by Derek Beaven is available from Amazon
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