The Guest
Emma Cline
(Author)
Description
A young woman pretends to be someone she isn't in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls. "A grifter tale for the post Anna Delvey era."--Vogue "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.Product Details
Price
$28.00
$26.04
Publisher
Random House
Publish Date
May 16, 2023
Pages
304
Dimensions
5.5 X 8.3 X 1.2 inches | 0.9 pounds
Language
English
Type
Hardcover
EAN/UPC
9780812998627
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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 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.
Reviews
"Cline generates an impressive amount of intrigue . . . The descriptions are frequently bracing and acute, sharpened to icepicks by a stance of amoral neutrality."--Wall Street Journal
"A wonderfully suspenseful examination of luxury, delusion, class and fear."--Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Enthralling . . . Who needs living when you've got The Guest in your bag?"--Jezebel "Emma Cline serves glitz and unease."--Vanity Fair "In her first novel since 2016's runaway hit The Girls Emma Cline returns with another story of sex and manipulation . . . The same things that make Alex a sketchy person also make her an infectious protagonist: She's a schemer, a liar, a seducer, and a thief . . . But 'hot mess' doesn't quite do justice to her entrancing resourcefulness even as the walls are closing in . . . Alex is amazing."--Philadelphia Inquirer "A smoldering thriller that explores desire and deception.'"--The Washington Post "With her propulsive third book, Cline confirms her reputation as the literary prophet of women on the brink . . . Dreamlike and disaffected, this charged study of class and gender lingers like a bad sunburn."--Esquire, "Best Books of Spring" & "Best Books of 2023 So Far" "[Cline has] skill with language . . . [and] shimmering insights into complexities of womanhood and desire."--Los Angeles Review of Books "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 "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
"Cline's writing at its very best--hypnotically propulsive, viscerally disquieting, and moving in the most unpredictable ways."--Financial Times "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 "The sheer anxiety level of watching Alex lure each new stranger (from the help to lonely rich teenagers), filling the endless hours until the next morning, 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 astonishing social observation, the profound and devastating visions of the void achieved with flicks of the wrist, the way it lets nobody off the hook and yet is not without deep humanity."--Sam Lipsyte "The talented Ms. Cline, as it were! Her prose is drifty and wire-taut, easy on the eye, with an awful undertow of unease that never lets up. The pathology brilliantly observed by The Guest would not feel so edgy if it were not perilously close to an aspirational ideal."--Geoff Dyer
"A wonderfully suspenseful examination of luxury, delusion, class and fear."--Minneapolis Star-Tribune "Enthralling . . . Who needs living when you've got The Guest in your bag?"--Jezebel "Emma Cline serves glitz and unease."--Vanity Fair "In her first novel since 2016's runaway hit The Girls Emma Cline returns with another story of sex and manipulation . . . The same things that make Alex a sketchy person also make her an infectious protagonist: She's a schemer, a liar, a seducer, and a thief . . . But 'hot mess' doesn't quite do justice to her entrancing resourcefulness even as the walls are closing in . . . Alex is amazing."--Philadelphia Inquirer "A smoldering thriller that explores desire and deception.'"--The Washington Post "With her propulsive third book, Cline confirms her reputation as the literary prophet of women on the brink . . . Dreamlike and disaffected, this charged study of class and gender lingers like a bad sunburn."--Esquire, "Best Books of Spring" & "Best Books of 2023 So Far" "[Cline has] skill with language . . . [and] shimmering insights into complexities of womanhood and desire."--Los Angeles Review of Books "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 "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
"Cline's writing at its very best--hypnotically propulsive, viscerally disquieting, and moving in the most unpredictable ways."--Financial Times "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 "The sheer anxiety level of watching Alex lure each new stranger (from the help to lonely rich teenagers), filling the endless hours until the next morning, 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 astonishing social observation, the profound and devastating visions of the void achieved with flicks of the wrist, the way it lets nobody off the hook and yet is not without deep humanity."--Sam Lipsyte "The talented Ms. Cline, as it were! Her prose is drifty and wire-taut, easy on the eye, with an awful undertow of unease that never lets up. The pathology brilliantly observed by The Guest would not feel so edgy if it were not perilously close to an aspirational ideal."--Geoff Dyer
