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.
