Indie Next Pick, Amazon Best Book of May, Library Reads pick
GQ, Best Books of 2023 * Esquire, Best Books of 2023 * Harper’s Bazaar, Best Books of 2023 Vogue, Best Books of 2023 * Elle, Most Anticipated Books of 2023 * The New York Times, Fiction to Read This Spring
“Sultry and engrossing, with a note of menace, it’s a gorgeously smart affair whose deceptive lightness conceals strange depths and an arresting originality.” -The Guardian
“Pitch-perfect…Full of suspense and subterfuge…In The Guest, Cline has written a thriller about trying to get by, a summer read for the precariat.” –The Nation
“Cline’s writing at its very best — hypnotically propulsive, viscerally disquieting, and moving in the most unpredictable ways.”–Financial Times
“Cline puts her fearsome talents to work depicting the deeply destructive capacity of a lone mind that is utterly sick of itself…The way [Cline’s] writing is hospitable to the senses represents the highest form of thinking.” –4 Columns
“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
“Cline quietly continues to be one of the best and most discomfiting young writers working today.” –Entertainment Weekly
“Eerily captivating.” –Elle
“A grifter tale for the post Anna Delvey era, a spellbinding literary rendering told from the perspective of the deceiver herself.” –Vogue
“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, 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
“No spare word, leaves you breathless, you’ll finish in a day.”—Megan Nolan
A young woman pretends to be someone she isn’t in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.
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.
Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline’s The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.