The Guest
By Emma Cline
Random House, May 16, 2023
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.
Selected Praise
“Cline’s writing is an addictive treat . . . a propulsive read starring an irresistible antihero.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“The payoffs are as gratifying as they are shattering.”—Publishers Weekly
About the Author
Emma Cline is the author of The Girls, the story collection Daddy, and The Guest, a novel forthcoming in May 2023. The Girls was an international bestseller and was a finalist for a National Book Critic's Circle Award, the First Novel Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. The winner of the Plimpton Prize, Cline was also named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Granta and The Best American Short Stories. In 2019, Cline was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Story Prize, and in 2021, she won an O. Henry Prize for “White Noise.”