The Guest

By Emma Cline,

Book cover of The Guest

Book description

* A TIMES 'Book of 2023' * 'Addictive' STYLIST Books to Look Out For 2023 * 'Destined to be the status read of 2023' HARPER'S BAZAAR BEST NEW FICTION * 'The perfect summer read' CULTURE WHISPER * An EVENING STANDARD 'Best New Books for Spring' * A Financial Times Best…

When you buy books, we may earn a commission that helps keep our lights on (or join the rebellion as a member).

Why read it?

5 authors picked The Guest as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

I love an audacious woman, even if she is a hot mess. This book follows Alex, a young woman who’s been staying at the Hamptons with an older man. She’s a calculated person, good at capitalizing on the good natures and human weaknesses of others, but a small misstep brings her free ride with the older man to an end. Instead of leaving, she decides to linger on Long Island.

Each night, she finds a new person to graft, a new scheme to help her stay. Spending time with Alex was stressful and made me want to shake her for…

This book was like the tensest and most darkly compelling roller coaster ride that I could not get off until the devastating final page.

Emma Cline is so good at delineating the messy inner lives of young women. In this book, she charts with almost real-time microscopic detail the weeklong meltdown of one pretty, very lost young woman, Alexa, as she perpetrates fraud after fraud on members of a uberwealthy summer town in the Hamptons, as well as their staffers and servants.

I was agog at Alexa’s brazenness, horrified and touched by her obvious unwellness and chilled by her ever-increasing…

The Guest is a brilliant novel about a woman who is lost as she drifts from house to house in the Hamptons, looking for a home.

The main character is hard to like at first, but in the end, she will break your heart. It’s gripping, uncomfortable at times, and reads like the best kind of literary thriller: a stunning achievement and a worthy successor to The Girls. 

If you love The Guest...

Ad

Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

Again not an original choice, but I couldn’t put The Guest down. I loved it because Emma Cline has this way of creating characters that are simultaneously specific and vague.

The whole time you’re reading, you have no idea how the main character, Alex, has burned her life to the ground, where she comes from, or who she actually is, but you can’t look away from her because she’s so consistent in her pretty horrifying behavior.

It’s one of those books where you really don’t want to relate to the protagonist, but a part of me did: the way Alex…

Cline’s novel is one of the most unsettling books I read this summer.

Readers follow the protagonist as she slowly and inescapably sinks lower and lower, all while losing her grip on reality. In almost every chapter, she disrupts, if not ruins, the lives of the people she uses in various schemes in the hopes of convincing the older rich man whom she had been sleeping with to take her back.

The novel has a languid pace, but there are so many exquisite passages peppered throughout the creeping dread as you watch the protagonist’s increasingly destructive choices play out.

If you love The Guest...

Ad

Book cover of Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor's Unlikely Adventure

Tap Dancing on Everest by Mimi Zieman,

Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.

The team attempts a new route up…

Want books like The Guest?

Our community of 12,000+ authors has personally recommended 77 books like The Guest.

Browse books like The Guest

Book cover of My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness
Book cover of Edinburgh
Book cover of Bath Haus: A Thriller

Share your top 3 reads of 2024!

And get a beautiful page showing off your 3 favorite reads.

1,708

readers submitted
so far, will you?

Ad

📚 If you like The Guest, you might also like...

Book cover of Dulcinea

Dulcinea by Ana Veciana-Suarez,

Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.

By doing so, he unwittingly exposes his muse…

Book cover of The Woman at the Wheel

The Woman at the Wheel by Penny Haw,

Inspiring historical fiction based on the real life of Bertha Benz, whose husband built the first prototype automobile, which eventually evolved into the Mercedes-Benz marque.

"Unfortunately, only a girl again."

From a young age, Cäcilie Bertha Ringer is fascinated by her father's work as a master builder in Pforzheim, Germany.…

5 book lists we think you will like!

Interested in the upper class, Long Island, and social class?

The Upper Class 96 books
Long Island 29 books
Social Class 101 books