Description: "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 rarified 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"--
Review Quotes: "Cline's writing at its very best--hypnotically 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 toget 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. Cline's exquisite writing makes us care in spite of ourselves."--People "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 . . ."--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 Cline's 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 you're 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 novel's sumptuous atmosphere and the thrill of trespass captured in Cline's 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 "The pathology brilliantly observed by The Guest would not feel so edgy if it were not perilously close to an aspirational ideal."--Geoff Dyer