The Guest: A Novel

by Emma Cline Narrated by Carlotta Brentan

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Emma Cline's first novel since The Girls is sly and sharp, and perfectly suited for fans of Otessa Moshfegh. (Prepare your fingers for papercuts as you tear through this propulsive story.)

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

A BELLETRIST BOOK CLUB PICK ¿ VULTURE'S INAUGURAL "BEACH BOOK READS" BOOK CLUB PICK ¿ 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.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

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

“Pitch-perfect . . . Full of suspense and subterfuge . . . Cline has written a thriller about trying to get by, a summer read for the precariat.”—The Nation

“Cline quietly continues to be one of the best and most discomfiting young writers working today.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Cline generates an impressive amount of intrigue . . . The descriptions are frequently bracing and acute, sharpened to icepicks by a stance of amoral neutrality.”—The Wall Street Journal

“A wonderfully suspenseful examination of luxury, delusion, class and fear.”—Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“Young, beautiful Alex is . . . a grifter wandering through a pricey, dreamlike summer playground looking for her next mark. Cline’s exquisite writing makes us care in spite of ourselves.”—People

“Enthralling . . . Who needs living when you’ve got The Guest in your bag?”—Jezebel

“Emma Cline serves glitz and unease.”—Vanity Fair

“In her first novel since 2016’s runaway hit The Girls Emma Cline returns with another story of sex and manipulation . . .”—Philadelphia Inquirer

“A smoldering thriller that explores desire and deception.’”—The Washington Post

“[Cline has] skill with language . . . [and] shimmering insights into complexities of womanhood and desire.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Cline is a master of depicting the nefarious and atmospheric menace that often lurks adjacent to our most glittery environments, and she does so here with subdued but no less cutting aplomb.”—Vogue

“Eerily captivating.”—Elle

“Cline weaves through settings and characters with intentional disorientation, shifting ever darker, ever more suspenseful . . . Cline proves herself to be one of the boldest, most complicated writers working today.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“Emma Cline’s The Guest . . . offers a sharp, nuanced approach to an outwardly frothy premise, submerging her readers in an anxiety-ridden world where class struggle seethes under the surface. . .” —TIME

“An intoxicating, sun-drunk work that tells the story of a hand-to-God grifter, one whose head you’re both terrified of and want to bask in forever, until you wake up sunburnt to a crisp.”—Nylon

“Galvanizing and so utterly readable. The reader, who ingests the novel’s sumptuous atmosphere and the thrill of trespass captured in Cline’s sharp, tense prose, is implicated alongside the protagonist.”—The Millions

“Her odyssey of desperation and misadventures feels like Barry Lyndon for Gen Z.”—BuzzFeed

“Will keep your blood pressure as high as if you were following a serial killer stalking their next victim.”—Paste

“I loved every moment of The Guest: the intensity, the control, the atmosphere, the psychological escalation . . . the way it lets nobody off the hook and yet is not without deep humanity.”—Sam Lipsyte

“The pathology brilliantly observed by The Guest would not feel so edgy if it were not perilously close to an aspirational ideal.”—Geoff Dyer

Library Journal

04/13/2023

With her latest, Cline (The Girls), a Granta Best of Young American Novelists, creates a deeply flawed central character who lives in her own reality with the help of drugs and alcohol. Alex makes her living as an escort in New York City, stealing money, drugs, and valuables from her clients because she thinks they won't mind or she won't be discovered or she will never see them again. She even steals a sizeable amount of money from Dom, a client with scary underworld connections, and then ghosts him. When she attracts the attention of a rich Wall Street broker named Simon who invites her to spend August with him at his house on Long Island, she thinks she might have secured a stable, long-term relationship. But Dom is stalking her, and when Simon finds out about him, he asks Alex to leave. Alex decides that he will cool off in a few days, so she spends a week couch surfing with various people she has duped and arrives, uninvited, at Simon's Labor Day party, expecting to be welcomed back with open arms. Cline cleverly leaves the outcome unresolved, but readers will easily imagine an ending. VERDICT Enjoyable reading for fans of contemporary fiction.—Joanna M. Burkhardt

AudioFile - JULY 2023

Carlotta Brentan narrates the story of a seemingly aimless young woman who is trying to survive. Alex is an unlikable grifter who moves through the world with no thought about the damage she causes to others or the harm she inflicts. Adrift after her relationship with an older man ends, she finds herself at loose ends on Long Island with no plan for how to make it through the upcoming holiday weekend. Brentan's flat delivery perfectly suits Alex's continual drugged state and affected indifference. Brentan provides a slightly brighter tone for secondary characters who interact with Alex. This ambiguous story is saved by Brentan's narration. K.M.P. © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940175093910
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	05/16/2023
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

This was August. The ocean was warm, and warmer every day.

Alex waited for a set to finish before making her way into the water, slogging through until it was deep enough to dive. A bout of strong swimming and she was out, beyond the break. The surface was calm.

From here, the sand was immaculate. The light—the famous light—made it all look honeyed and mild: the dark European green of the scrub trees, the dune grasses that moved in whispery Unison. The cars in the parking lot. Even the seagulls swarming a trash can.

On the shore, the towels were occupied by placid beachgoers. A man tanned to the color of expensive luggage let out a yawn, a young mother watched her children run back and forth to the waterline.

What would they see if they looked at Alex?

In the water, she was just like everyone else. Nothing strange about a young woman, swimming alone. No way to tell whether she belonged here or didn’t.

When Simon had first taken her to the beach, he’d kicked off his shoes at the entrance. Everyone did, apparently: there were shoes and sandals piled up by the low wood railing. No one takes them? Alex asked. Simon raised his eyebrows. Who would take someone’s shoes?

But that had been Alex’s immediate thought—how easy it would be to take things, out here. All sorts of things. The bikes leaning against the fence. The bags unattended on towels. The cars left unlocked, no one wanting to carry their keys on the beach. A system that existed only because everyone believed they were among people like themselves.

Before Alex left for the beach, she had swallowed one of Simon’s painkillers, a leftover from a long-ago back surgery, and already the familiar mental gauze had descended, the surrounding salt water another narcotic. Her heart beat pleasantly, noticeably, in her chest. Why did being in the ocean make you feel like such a good human? She floated on her back, her body moving a little in the push and pull, her eyes closed against the sun.

There was a party tonight, hosted by one of Simon’s friends. Or a business friend—all his friends were business friends. Until then, hours to waste. Simon would be working the rest of the day, Alex left to her own devices, as she had been ever since they’d come out here—almost two weeks now. She hadn’t minded. She’d gone to the beach nearly every day. Worked through Simon’s painkiller stash at a steady but undetectable pace, or so she hoped. And ignored Dom’s increasingly unhinged texts, which was easy enough to do. He had no idea where she was. She tried blocking his number, but he got through with new ones. She would change her number as soon as she got the chance. Dom had sent another jag that morning:

Alex

Alex

Answer me

Even if the texts still caused a lurch in her stomach, she had only to look up from the phone and it all seemed manageable. She was in Simon’s house, the windows open onto pure green. Dom was in another sphere, one she could pretend no longer quite existed.

Still floating on her back, Alex opened her eyes, disoriented by the quick hit of sun. She righted herself with a glance at the shore: she was farther out than she’d imagined. Much farther. How had that happened? She tried to head back in, toward the beach, but she wasn’t seeming to get anywhere, her strokes eaten up by the water.

She took a breath, tried again. Her legs kicked hard. Her arms churned. It was impossible to gauge whether the shore was getting any closer. Another attempt to head straight back in, more useless swimming. The sun kept beating down, the horizon line wavered: it was all utterly indifferent.

The end—here it was.

This was punishment, she was certain of it.

Strange, though, how this terror didn’t last. It only passed through her, appearing and disappearing almost instantly.

Something else took its place, a kind of reptile curiosity.

She considered the distance, considered her heart rate, made a calm assessment of the elements in play. Hadn’t she always been good at seeing things clearly?

Time to change course. She swam parallel to the shore. Her body took over, remembering the strokes. She didn’t allow for any hesitation. At some point, the water started resisting her with less force, and then she was moving along, getting closer to shore, and then close enough that her feet touched the sand.

She was out of breath, yes. Her arms were sore, her heartbeat juddered out of sync. She was much farther down the beach.

But fine—she was fine.

The fear was already forgotten.

No one on the shore noticed her, or looked twice. A couple walked past, heads bent, studying the sand for shells. A man in waders assembled a fishing pole. Laughter floated over from a group under a tent. Surely, if Alex had been in any real danger, someone would have reacted, one of these people would have stepped in to help.

Simon’s car was fun to drive. Frighteningly responsive, frighteningly fast. Alex hadn’t bothered to change out of her swimsuit, and the leather upholstery cooked her thighs. Even at a good speed, the car windows down, the air was thick and warm. What problem did Alex need to solve at this moment? Nothing. No variables to calculate, the painkiller still doing its good work. Compared to the city, this was heaven.

The city. She was not in the city, and thank god for that.

It was Dom, of course, but not only Dom. Even before Dom, something had soured. In March she had turned twenty-two without fanfare. She had a recurring stye that drooped her left eyelid unpleasantly. The makeup she applied to cover it only made it worse: she reinfected herself, the stye pulsing for months. Finally she’d gotten an antibiotic prescribed at a walk-in clinic. Every night she tugged on her lids and squeezed a line of medicated ointment straight into the socket. Involuntary tears streamed only from her left eye.

On the subway, or on the sidewalks, woolly with new snow, Alex had started to notice strangers giving her a certain look. Their gaze lingering. A woman in a plaid mohair coat studied Alex with unnerving focus, her expression twisted with what seemed like mounting concern. A man, his wrists white under the strain of many plastic bags, stared at Alex until she finally got off the train.

What were people seeing in her aura, what stink was emanating?

Maybe she was imagining it. But maybe not.

She’d been twenty when she first arrived in the city. Back when she still had the energy to use a fake name, and still believed gestures like that had value, meant the things she was doing weren’t actually happening in her real life. Back when she kept lists: The names of the places she went with the men. Restaurants that charged for bread and butter. Restaurants that refolded your napkin when you went to the bathroom. Restaurants that only served steak, pink but flavorless and thick as a hardcover book. Brunches at mid-range hotels, with unripe strawberries and too-sweet juice, slurry with pulp. But the appeal of the lists wore off quickly or something about them started to depress her, so she stopped.

Now Alex was no longer welcome in certain hotel bars, had to avoid certain restaurants. Whatever charm she had was losing its potency. Not fully, not totally, but enough that she began to understand it was a possibility. She saw it happen to others, the older girls she’d known since moving here. They defected for their hometowns, making a grab at a normal life, or else disappeared entirely.

In April: A manager had, in low tones, threatened to call the police after she’d tried to charge dinner to an old client’s account. Too many of her usuals stopped reaching out, for whatever reason—ultimatums eked out of couples therapy and this new fad of radical honesty, or the first flushes of guilt precipitated by the birth of children, or just plain boredom. Her monthly cash flow fell precipitously. Alex considered breast augmentation. She rewrote her ad copy, paid an exorbitant fee to be featured in the first page of results. Dropped her rates, then dropped them again.

Six hundred roses, the ads said. Six hundred kisses. Things only very young girls would want six hundred of.

Alex got a series of laser treatments: flashes of blue light soaked her face while she looked out of tinted medical goggles like a somber spaceman. In the meantime, she had her photos redone by a twitchy art student who asked, mildly, whether she might consider a trade for services. He had a pet bunny that lurched around his makeshift studio, its eyes demonic pink.

May: One of her roommates wondered why their Klonopin was dwindling so rapidly. A gift card had gone missing, a favorite bracelet. A consensus that Alex had been the one to break the window unit. Had Alex broken the window unit? She had no memory of it, but it was possible. Things she touched started to seem doomed.

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