LoveReading Says
LoveReading Says
Super addictive, Emma Cline’s The Guest is a dream of a summer read. Achieving a sweet spot between offering an escape into its sun-drenched Long Island setting (think lavish parties in luxury beach houses), and laying bare dubious human behaviours (among them manipulation and dodgy sugar daddies), it’s edgily compelling.
From the off, The Guest is shot-thought with suspense, with its protagonist inviting a bunch of questions — what’s Alex’s deal? Why is Dom leaving her all those desperate messages? What’s she doing with that fifty-year-old rich guy?
Alex’s summer of (transactional) sex and expensive gifts looks set to be cut short when Simon (said fifty-year-old rich guy) tells her to leave his fancy beach house. With no money, nowhere to go, and past errors snapping at her heels, Alex decides to stick around the area until Simon’s Labor Day party is in full swing – he’s bound to take her back, right?
Though she has no money, Alex does have plenty of power when it comes to knowing how to play people. She’s a born grifter. A mistress of manipulation who’s smart at assessing how to win the trust of her well-picked targets, for however fleeting a time. But, with her past catching up with her at a quickening pace as she counts down to the party, Alex takes greater and greater risks, and becomes increasingly desperate, deluded and disturbed. All of which adds up to a fabulously thrilling story for fans of fiction featuring unreliable, off-the-wall narrators.
Joanne Owen
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The Guest Synopsis
Summer is coming to a close on Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome...
One 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, but a gift for navigating the desires of others, Alex stays on the island. She drifts like a ghost through the gated driveways and sun-blasted dunes of a rarefied world, trailing destruction in her wake.
Taut, sensual and impossible to look away from, The Guest captures the latent heat and potential danger of a summer that could go either way for a young woman teetering on the edge.
About This Edition
ISBN: |
9781784743734 |
Publication date: |
18th May 2023 |
Author: |
Emma Cline |
Publisher: |
Chatto & Windus an imprint of Vintage Publishing |
Format: |
Hardback |
Pagination: |
291 pages |
Primary Genre |
Crime and Mystery
|
Other Genres: |
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Press Reviews
Emma Cline Press Reviews
The talented Ms. Cline . . . 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
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
This novel promises to be the perfect summer read - Culture Whisper,Books to Look Out For 2023*
Cline on sterling form; eerie and masterful. The Guest is destined to be the status read of 2023 - Harper's Bazaar,Best New Fiction Books to Read in 2023*
Cline has a crime writer's gift for revelatory storytelling, ramping up tension like an HBO pro - Big Issue
Author
About Emma Cline
Emma Cline is from California. Her fiction has appeared in Tin House and the Paris Review. She was the recipient of the 2014 Paris Review Plimpton Prize for fiction and is a Granta Best Young American Novelist.
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