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 LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN FAULKNER AWARD • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker
Time NPR The Washington Post Financial Times Harper’s 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 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.
