Author(s): Emma Cline

Fiction | Mel M's Book Talkers

The hotly anticipated new novel from the author of the global phenomenon, The Girls. 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. PRAISE FOR EMMA CLINE 'Taut, beautiful and savage' GUARDIAN 'So deft, with an undercurrent of unease' PANDORA SYKES 'Stunning . . . thrilling . . . a spectacular achievement' THE TIMES 'Cline's talent at uncovering the seedy and somehow bringing it to beautiful light is brilliant 'DAISY JOHNSON 'Something about Cline's intimate tone, her talent for conjuring the feeling of being alive, is entirely and uniquely her own' RACHEL KUSHNER

CONSTANT READER STAFF REVIEW: MEL M

I started reading this on a tropical vacation overseas and it made me look askance at those around me – what secrets simmer inside these people, what miseries are they failing to escape? What are the hidden injuries of the class structures we swim in?

Cline’s novel explores these questions as its young woman and former escort protagonist Alex struggles her way through a week in a summer town near L.A. in the lead-up to a party she’s pinned too many hopes on. Unexpectedly homeless but hopeful, Alex parasitically and remorsefully tears through the lives of the people she encounters without much insight into why she is the way that she is. It was so compelling to read about her type of character, a shadowy contrast to all of the (in my opinion unrealistic) emotionally hyperliterate young women who populate contemporary fiction.

 As she moves through different social settings and circumstances, Alex shifts like a chameleon but can never really shake her past or her destructive tendencies. I won’t ever forget some of the encounters described in this novel nor its chilling ending.