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A Novel
by Emma Cline
A young woman pretends to be someone she isn't in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.
"Alex drained her wineglass, then her water glass. The ocean looked calm, a black darker than the sky. A ripple of anxiety made her palms go damp. It seemed suddenly very tenuous to believe that anything would stay hidden, that she could successfully pass from one world to another."
Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome.
A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she's been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city.
With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarefied world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.
Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline's The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.
"Cline does pretty-but-creepy like no one else and now takes her brand of alluring ickiness to the wealthy enclaves of Long Island...A propulsive read starring an irresistible antihero." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A 22-year-old woman loses her apartment and her grip on reality in the provocative latest from Cline (The Girls)...Cline has a keen eye for class differences and makes Alex into an intriguing protagonist who has learned to be observant, but must also recognize she's losing her judgment if she wants to survive. Like watching a car crash, this is hard to look away from." —Publishers Weekly
"A grifter tale for the post-Anna Delvey era, a spellbinding literary rendering told from the perspective of the deceiver herself ... Cline is a master of depicting the nefarious and atmospheric menace that often lurks adjacent to our most glittery environments, and she does so here with subdued but no less cutting aplomb." —Vogue
"Cline quietly continues to be one of the best and most discomfiting young writers working today." —Entertainment Weekly
"Eerily captivating." —Elle
"Emma Cline's second novel is tense and restrained, as careful and controlled as the woman at its center—before she begins to unravel at the seams. This is a slow-motion car crash of a book: it's extremely hard to look away." —Lit Hub
"Her odyssey of desperation and misadventures feels like Barry Lyndon for Gen Z." —Buzzfeed
This information about The Guest was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Emma Cline is the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls and the story collection Daddy. The Girls was a finalist for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was a New York Times Editors' Choice and the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. Cline's stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. She received the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review and an O. Henry Award, and was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.
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