The Guest

BOOK SUMMARY

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.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emma Cline is the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls and the story collection Daddy. The Girls was a finalist for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle's John Leonard Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was a New York Times Editors' Choice and the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. Cline's stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow, received the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review and an O. Henry Award, and was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.

PRAISE

"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

PRODUCT INFORMATION

Trade Paperback
320 Pages 
Fiction
8 in H | 5.2 in W | 0.6 in T | 0.5 lb