The second novel from the author of the critically acclaimed Newton's Niece (1994). On an ocean liner travelling to Australia in 1959, a young boy witnesses a courtship between two of its passengers, a relationship that begins to unsettle the others aboard. Beneath them in the hold, beyond where the dogs and cats and mynah bird are kept, squats a far more sinister cargo - a nuclear arms shipment bound for the Outback testing grounds. A romantic love affair then, on a doomed boat in dangerous oceans, in the background the bruised and brooding England of the 1950s; a devastatingly accurate examination of English class and manners; a story about national and domestic violence and its consequences. Brimming with unforgettable descriptions of the seas, its animals, its weather and the ports stopped at along the way, Acts of Mutiny establishes Derek Beaven as one of England's finest new writers.

A critically acclaimed, Booker long-listed novel that is reminiscent of Pat Barker's 'Regeneration Trilogy'. Clarice Pike and Vic Warren are from completely different backgrounds. An impossible affair has already driven them thousands of miles apart. 1939 finds Clarice in Malaya where her father is an obscure company doctor, and Vic in East London, an unemployed shipwright badly married to Phylis, Clarice's cousin. As their feelings conspire to draw the lovers back together, the world erupts with a terrible violence. It is the relentlessness of male brutality that forces Vic to grope towards what real manhood might be. 'If the Invader Comes' combines themes from Derek Beaven's previously acclaimed 'Newton's Niece' and 'Acts of Mutiny' to portray a wartime England where human relationships are threatened as much from within the family as from occupied Europe. Exciting, moving and ultimately optimistic, Derek Beaven's new novel represents a daring leap in British fiction.

A reissue of Derek Beaven's first novel -- originally published by Faber -- a lavish and richly detailed portrait of the world of Newton and the London of that time. From the disturbing goings-on in a South London mental hospital, the narrator of this daring and ambitious novel hurtles back through the past, to the character of Kit, Isaac Newton's niece. What unfolds is a story of conflicting male and female universes at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a time when Newton and others were claiming the meaning of the world for themselves and trying to fix it in their grid, an emotional asphyxiation Kit determines to fight against. Full of music and science and politics, Newton's Niece is a book about disorientation, human life as self-experiment and the nature of Time, a novel that boldly explores sexual politics and the early feminist struggle. 'Magnificent set pieces, a richness of thought, a prodigal and original talent.' Time Out