The Guest: A Novel (Unabridged)
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3.2 • 94 Ratings
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A young woman pretends to be someone she isn’t in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls.
“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.
Customer Reviews
Great writing, unnecessarily terrible ending
I’m torn on this review, having been captivated by the read but seriously disappointed by the ending.
I don’t usually read fiction but a friend suggested this book as a must read. That said, I truly enjoyed Emma Cline’s writing style and her ability to place you in Alex’s mind as we follow her crumbing life play out one bad decision at a time, cringing all the way. You’re purposely conflicted by Alex. You want to pity and relate to her but her actions are so predatory and nearly devoid of morality that you can’t quite bring yourself to do it. Is she a sociopath or a victim? Is she just a young person desperately trying to survive in a cesspool of elitists or a delusional sycophant? It never clearly says.
Do things ever get better? Does she ever get her comeuppance? Does she ever find love, redemption, or even a safe place to lie her head? Does she ever quit the lifestyle or see the big picture?
We’ll never know because the author just ends the book with no resolution whatsoever. It literally just ends, answering no questions in the process. The book has you take in a deep breath but ends by telling to just keep holding it without relief.
Hopefully the author will write a sequel to it, giving some resolution to Alex’s life, one way or another.
The story is good, the reading of it is not
Can I return an audiobook? The reader mimicking the make voices is awful, it distracts from the story. It’s comical.
Story: 4 stars
Don’t waste your time
Boring and pointless. The main character is shallow and unlikeable. Don’t waste your money.