"Cheryl is both devious and complicated... Her interloper perspective allows for bold reflections--knowing that she 'could have ended up somewhere where people had good reason to be unhappy.'" -

"A perfect, and perfectly dark, beach read." -

"John Cheever and John Updike were once the rulers of American suburban fiction; in Bullet Park, The Swimmer and Couples they outlined a portrait of the middlebrow milquetoast within the post-60s New Left. Waclawiak writes of the suburban rituals of status and boredom with the same acuity for detail as those writers, but the domestic setting she creates around Cheryl and Teddy is a thoroughly post-millennial world, the kind prophesied by Jean Baudrillard when he quipped, 'What do we do after the orgy?'" -

"Karolina Waclawiak'sisn't about a family as much as it is about people who are deeply committed to their own destruction... An elegant book about the difficulty of casting off who you've been and who you've become." -

"With deft humor and insight, Waclawiak reveals her characters' long-hidden vulnerabilities.The Invadersasks us to contemplate what happens to people's hearts when their lives are lived on the surface." - O, The Oprah Magazine)

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.

, a searing follow-up to Karolina Waclawiak's critically acclaimed debut novel, , 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, exposes the lies and insecurities that run like faultlines through our culture, threatening to pitch bored housewives, pill-popping children, and suspicious neighbors headlong into the suburban abyss.