The Guest: A Novel

Emma Cline

May 2023 · Sold by Random House

About this ebook

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A young woman pretends to be someone she isn’t in this “spellbinding” (Vogue), “smoldering” (The Washington Post) novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.
 
“Under Cline’s command, every sentence as sharp as a scalpel, a woman toeing the line between welcome and unwelcome guest becomes a fully destabilizing force.”—The New York Times

LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Glamour, Newsweek, Good Housekeeping, Slate, Time Out, Chicago Public Library, Electric Lit, Bookreporter

“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.

Ratings and reviews

an unexpectedly gripping depiction of a very particular type of interiority, one defined not so much by an inner landscape of robust perspective and identity but by the negative space surrounding it. much as melville's description of the sea in moby dick gives a backdrop for the whale's jutting streak of white, so do the circumstances that alex faces serve as a canvas through which she moves, a shoreline along which she carves out a momentum (or is it inertia?) of comforts and certainties for herself. that her momentum is ultimately insufficient at best and rooted in delusion at worst lends an unsettling air of tragedy to Alex's life, even as she glides through it less like a character who's present in her own story and more as her own carefully self-constructed absence. as if she's a ghost cursed to relive this week (or this life?) over and over, ans the only way to cope with the eternal recurrence of her failings is to chip away at herself until she's as gone as she's always felt.

phenomenal.

About the author

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 was named a Guggenheim Fellow, 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.