Remake

A spine-tingling new novel from the critically acclaimed author of If the Invader Comes and Acts of Mutiny

What do you do when Illusion, Tragedy and Comedy all come at once—and stay overnight!

West London, Summer 1995. The British film industry is at its usual last gasp. Jackie Juste’s successful career on stage and screen has hit the skids due to a strange disorder, an ‘anorexia of the eye, following a fracture of the heart’. Jackie, who requires stage make-up even to see a face in the mirror, has taken Vows of Abstinence: ‘I simply would not whore myself any longer around the scene: stage, movies, anything. After nearly twenty years, I felt sullied by the scripts of a century.’

But chance encounters are about to turn life itself bizarrely performative. As the protagonists of Derek Beaven’s edge-of-the-seat novel criss-cross London to escape the mysterious Dr F (an antagonist hellbent it seems on keeping lovers apart) they enact scenes of extravagant desire and terror, of uncanny mimetic compulsion, in a wealth of fascinating sets and locations—not least, after all the narrative ebbs and flows, in the extraordinary estuary-based denouement to this strikingly original work of gothic romance.

Previous novels by Derek Beaven
‘Magnificent set pieces, a richness of thought, a prodigal and original talent make this a novel worth reading from a writer worth watching.’
Time Out on Newton’s Niece

‘You’ll be lulled by Beaven’s descriptive talent and transported by the novel’s more conventional pleasures—sympathetic characters and an exciting, geopolitical plot.’
Mark Schone New York Times Book Review on Acts of Mutiny

‘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 on If the Invader Comes

‘This is a fine novel that achieves an extraordinary exactitude of feeling matched by a perfect sense of place.’
Jane Housham Guardian on His Coldest Winter

Cover Image by Tom Niven