The Guest

**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.