The Guest

(Paperback, Large Print Edition)

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER A young woman pretends to be someone she isnt in thisspellbinding (Vogue), smoldering (The Washington Post)novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.

Under Clines 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, Harpers 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 shes 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 Clines The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.

Reviews

Clines writing at its very besthypnotically propulsive, viscerally disquieting, and moving in the most unpredictable ways.Financial Times

Sultry and engrossing, with a note of menace, [The Guest] [is a] gorgeously smart affair whose deceptive lightness conceals strange depths and an arresting originality.The Guardian

Cline confirms her reputation as the literary prophet of women on the brink.Esquire

Pitch-perfect . . . Full of suspense and subterfuge . . . Cline has written a thriller about trying to
get by, a summer read for the precariat.The Nation

Cline quietly continues to be one of the best and most discomfiting young writers working today.Entertainment Weekly

Cline generates an impressive amount of intrigue . . . The descriptions are frequently bracing and acute, sharpened to icepicks by a stance of amoral neutrality.The Wall Street Journal

A wonderfully suspenseful examination of luxury, delusion, class and fear.Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Young, beautiful Alex is . . . a grifter wandering through a pricey, dreamlike summer playground looking for her next mark. Clines exquisite writing makes us care in spite of ourselves.People

Enthralling . . . Who needs living when youve got The Guest in your bagJezebel

Emma Cline serves glitz and unease.Vanity Fair

In her first novel since 2016s runaway hit The Girls Emma Cline returns with another story of sex and manipulation . . .Philadelphia Inquirer

A smoldering thriller that explores desire and deception.The Washington Post

[Cline has] skill with language . . . [and] shimmering insights into complexities of womanhood and desire.Los Angeles Review of Books

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

Eerily captivating.Elle

Cline weaves through settings and characters with intentional disorientation, shifting ever darker, ever more suspenseful . . . Cline proves herself to be one of the boldest, most complicated writers working today.San Francisco Chronicle

Emma Clines The Guest . . . offers a sharp, nuanced approach to an outwardly frothy premise, submerging her readers in an anxiety-ridden world where class struggle seethes under the surface. . . TIME

An intoxicating, sun-drunk work that tells the story of a hand-to-God grifter, one whose head youre both terrified of and want to bask in forever, until you wake up sunburnt to a crisp.Nylon

Galvanizing and so utterly readable. The reader, who ingests the novels sumptuous atmosphere and the thrill of trespass captured in Clines sharp, tense prose, is implicated alongside the protagonist.The Millions

Her odyssey of desperation and misadventures feels like Barry Lyndon for Gen Z.BuzzFeed

Will keep your blood pressure as high as if you were following a serial killer stalking their next victim.Paste

I loved every moment of The Guest: the intensity, the control, the atmosphere, the psychological escalation . . . the way it lets nobody off the hook and yet is not without deep humanity.Sam Lipsyte

Thepathology brilliantly observed by The Guest would not feel so edgyif it were not perilously close to an aspirational ideal.Geoff Dyer

Author Bio

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 Fictions First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circles 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. Clines stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. Shewas named a Guggenheim Fellow,received the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review and an O. Henry Award, and was chosen as one of Grantas Best Young American Novelists.