The Guest

A Novel

By: Emma Cline

Narrated by: Carlotta Brentan

Length: 8 hrs and 36 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2023 Emma Cline (P)2023 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“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

Excellent narration, terrible ending

If only the story - especially the ending of this book - was done as well as the narration. My rating would have been much higher, otherwise.

What the ???

I’m just wasted a bunch of time on a book with basically no point or ending. I liked it’s we were going along but, man, the lack of ending ruined it.

Somehow compelling despite no story

I’m going to be nicer than most reviews because I have thoroughly enjoyed listening to this book right up until the end.
The voice performance is simultaneously annoyingly boring and yet a perfect mood for the character.
The story itself is compelling enough to keep me eagerly coming back, but the ending just sucks. There is no ending. It’s a non-ending. A refusal to allow anything to actually happen.
I would have rather Alex realized her dream was never going to happened and jumped a plane to somewhere or get caught by Dom or be taken back by Simon, something. Literally anything other than nothing.

A sorry that goes nowhere

Although there are a lot of comparisons to other prominent literature, this story is colorful, but goes nowhere

Self indulgent user

I couldn’t stop reading- waiting for her to get what was coming to her- and then she didn’t- disappointing ending.

What just happened?

I read it, er, listened to the end, but what just happened? Alex meanders through Long Island fooling everyone for awhile before she breaks something that always includes the trust of others. Of course, she is fooling herself most of all by believing that she can continue to use people, but can she do so without becoming just used up? Then it ends. It just ends.

Nope

Worst ending ever. Waste of time. The story just does not make sense, and builds up to nothing!

Can't believe I bought the hype

It's a rare literary achievement to create an entire book filled with such loathesomely bland and annoying characters. I pretty much hated them all and couldn't wait for this to end.

Wretched ending

Intriguing and highly descriptive writing style but the story rambles. If the ending had been less crudely ambiguous, then the wandering style would have worked better. The “Jack” portion of the story was needlessly meandering with a disappointing conclusion that barely propelled the character forward. Dom could have been a formidable antagonist, but he evaporated within the navel-gazing prose. Simon turns out to be no better than a mannequin at the end. The main character’s grist through the Hamptons could have had a destructive path or journey of growth, but neither occurs. She’s just a an unsympathetic parasite with no reason to have her story told. Not worth the excessive hype at all. Needed a far better editing job to make this worth publishing. Not recommended.

Flat plot, frustrating ending.

I generally like most books, even when other people say they’re not that exciting. But this was a truly uneventful read building up to what can only be described as a non-ending.