The Guest

“A grifter tale for the post Anna Delvey era, a spellbinding literary rendering told from the perspective of the deceiver herself . . . 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

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

“Eerily captivating.”—Elle

“Cline’s writing at its very best—hypnotically propulsive, viscerally disquieting, and moving in the most unpredictable ways.”—Financial Times

“Emma Cline’s second novel is tense and restrained, as careful and controlled as the woman at its center—before she begins to unravel at the seams. This is a slow-motion car crash of a book: it’s extremely hard to look away.”—Lit Hub

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

“The sheer anxiety level of watching Alex lure each new stranger (from the help to lonely rich teenagers), filling the endless hours until the next morning, 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 astonishing social observation, the profound and devastating visions of the void achieved with flicks of the wrist, the way it lets nobody off the hook and yet is not without deep humanity.”—Sam Lipsyte

“The talented Ms. Cline, as it were! Her prose is drifty and wire-taut, easy on the eye, with an awful undertow of unease that never lets up. The pathology brilliantly observed by The Guest would not feel so edgy if it were not perilously close to an aspirational ideal.”—Geoff Dyer