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
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.
