The guest: a novel by Amazonundefined

Price last update: 16/03/2024

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A young woman pretends to be someone she isnt in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls. 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 rarified 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 Clines The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.
Recenzja
Clines writing at its very besthypnotically 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
Pitch-perfect . . . Full of suspense and subterfuge . . . Cline has written a thriller about trying to get by, a summer read for the precariat.
The Nation
Cline quietly continues to be one of the best and most discomfiting young writers working today.
Entertainment Weekly
Cline generates an impressive amount of intrigue . . . The descriptions are frequently bracing and acute, sharpened to icepicks by a stance of amoral neutrality.
The Wall Street Journal
A wonderfully suspenseful examination of luxury, delusion, class and fear.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Young, beautiful Alex is . . . a grifter wandering through a pricey, dreamlike summer playground looking for her next mark. Clines exquisite writing makes us care in spite of ourselves.
People
Enthralling . . . Who needs living when youve got
The Guest
in your bag?
Jezebel
Emma Cline serves glitz and unease.
Vanity Fair
In her first novel since 2016s runaway hit
The Girls
Emma Cline returns with another story of sex and manipulation . . .
Philadelphia Inquirer
A smoldering thriller that explores desire and deception.
The Washington Post
[Cline has] skill with language . . . [and] shimmering insights into complexities of womanhood and desire.
Los Angeles Review of Books
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
Eerily captivating.
Elle
Cline weaves through settings and characters with intentional disorientation, shifting ever darker, ever more suspenseful . . . Cline proves herself to be one of the boldest, most complicated writers working today.
San Francisco Chronicle
Emma Clines
The Guest
. . . offers a sharp, nuanced approach to an outwardly frothy premise, submerging her readers in an anxiety-ridden world where class struggle seethes under the surface. . .
TIME
An intoxicating, sun-drunk work that tells the story of a hand-to-God grifter, one whose head youre both terrified of and want to bask in forever, until you wake up sunburnt to a crisp.
Nylon
Galvanizing and so utterly readable. The reader, who ingests the novels sumptuous atmosphere and the thrill of trespass captured in Clines sharp, tense prose, is implicated alongside the protagonist.
The Millions
Her odyssey of desperation and misadventures feels like Barry Lyndon for Gen Z.
BuzzFeed
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 way it lets nobody off the hook and yet is not without deep humanity.
Sam Lipsyte
The pathology brilliantly observed by
The Guest
would not feel so edgy if it were not perilously close to an aspirational ideal.
Geoff Dyer
Opis z tylnej okładki książki
A young woman pretends to be someone she isnt in this stunning novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls. 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 rarified 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 Clines The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.
O autorze
Emma Cline
is the
New York Times
bestselling author of
The Girls
and the story collection
Daddy
.
The Girls
was a finalist for the Center for Fictions First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circles John Leonard Prize, and the
Los Angeles Times
Book Prize. It was a
New York Times
Editors Choice and the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. Clines stories have been published in
The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review,
and
The Best American Short Stories
. She received the Plimpton Prize from
The Paris Review
and an O. Henry Award, and was chosen as one of
Granta
s Best Young American Novelists.
Fragment książki opublikowany za zgodą wydawcy. Wszelkie prawa zastrzeżone.
1
This was August. The ocean was warm, and warmer every day.Alex waited for a set to finish before making her way into the water, slogging through until it was deep enough to dive. A bout of strong swimming and she was out, beyond the break. The surface was calm.From here, the sand was immaculate. The lightthe famous lightmade it all look honeyed and mild: the dark European green of the scrub trees, the dune grasses that moved in whispery Unison. The cars in the parking lot. Even the seagulls swarming a trash can.On the shore, the towels were occupied by placid beachgoers. A man tanned to the color of expensive luggage let out a yawn, a young mother watched her children run back and forth to the waterline.What would they see if they looked at Alex?In the water, she was just like everyone else. Nothing strange about a young woman, swimming alone. No way to tell whether she belonged here or didnt.When Simon had first taken her to the beach, hed kicked off his shoes at the entrance. Everyone did, apparently: there were shoes and sandals piled up by the low wood railing. No one takes them? Alex asked. Simon raised his eyebrows. Who would take someones shoes?But that had been Alexs immediate thoughthow easy it would be to take things, out here. All sorts of things. The bikes leaning against the fence. The bags unattended on towels. The cars left unlocked, no one wanting to carry their keys on the beach. A system that existed only because everyone believed they were among people like themselves.Before Alex left for the beach, she had swallowed one of Simons painkillers, a leftover from a long-ago back surgery, and already the familiar mental gauze had descended, the surrounding salt water another narcotic. Her heart beat pleasantly, noticeably, in her chest. Why did being in the ocean make you feel like such a good human? She floated on her back, her body moving a little in the push and pull, her eyes closed against the sun.There was a party tonight, hosted by one of Simons friends. Or a business friendall his friends were business friends. Until then, hours to waste. Simon would be working the rest of the day, Alex left to her own devices, as she had been ever since theyd come out herealmost two weeks now. She hadnt minded. Shed gone to the beach nearly every day. Worked through Simons painkiller stash at a steady but undetectable pace, or so she hoped. And ignored Doms increasingly unhinged texts, which was easy enough to do. He had no idea where she was. She tried blocking his number, but he got through with new ones. She would change her number as soon as she got the chance. Dom had sent another jag that morning:
AlexAlexAnswer me
Even if the texts still caused a lurch in her stomach, she had only to look up from the phone and it all seemed manageable. She was in Simons house, the windows open onto pure green. Dom was in another sphere, one she could pretend no longer quite existed.Still floating on her back, Alex opened her eyes, disoriented by the quick hit of sun. She righted herself with a glance at the shore: she was farther out than shed imagined. Much farther. How had that happened? She tried to head back in, toward the beach, but she wasnt seeming to get anywhere, her strokes eaten up by the water.She took a breath, tried again. Her legs kicked hard. Her arms churned. It was impossible to gauge whether the shore was getting any closer. Another attempt to head straight back in, more useless swimming. The sun kept beating down, the horizon line wavered: it was all utterly indifferent.The endhere it was.This was punishment, she was certain of it. Strange, though, how this terror didnt last. It only passed through her, appearing and disappearing almost instantly.Something else took its place, a kind of reptile curiosity.She considered the distance, considered her heart rate, made a calm assessment of the elements in play. Hadnt she always been good at seeing things clearly?Time to change course. She swam parallel to the shore. Her body took over, remembering the strokes. She didnt allow for any hesitation. At some point, the water started resisting her with less force, and then she was moving along, getting closer to shore, and then close enough that her feet touched the sand.She was out of breath, yes. Her arms were sore, her heartbeat juddered out of sync. She was much farther down the beach.But fineshe was fine.The fear was already forgotten.No one on the shore noticed her, or looked twice. A couple walked past, heads bent, studying the sand for shells. A man in waders assembled a fishing pole. Laughter floated over from a group under a tent. Surely, if Alex had been in any real danger, someone would have reacted, one of these people would have stepped in to help.Simons car was fun to drive. Frighteningly responsive, frighteningly fast. Alex hadnt bothered to change out of her swimsuit, and the leather upholstery cooked her thighs. Even at a good speed, the car windows down, the air was thick and warm. What problem did Alex need to solve at this moment? Nothing. No variables to calculate, the painkiller still doing its good work. Compared to the city, this was heaven.The city. She was not in the city, and thank god for that.It was Dom, of course, but not only Dom. Even before Dom, something had soured. In March she had turned twenty-two without fanfare. She had a recurring stye that drooped her left eyelid unpleasantly. The makeup she applied to cover it only made it worse: she reinfected herself, the stye pulsing for months. Finally shed gotten an antibiotic prescribed at a walk-in clinic. Every night she tugged on her lids and squeezed a line of medicated ointment straight into the socket. Involuntary tears streamed only from her left eye.On the subway, or on the sidewalks, woolly with new snow, Alex had started to notice strangers giving her a certain look. Their gaze lingering. A woman in a plaid mohair coat studied Alex with unnerving focus, her expression twisted with what seemed like mounting concern. A man, his wrists white under the strain of many plastic bags, stared at Alex until she finally got off the train.What were people seeing in her aura, what stink was emanating?Maybe she was imagining it. But maybe not.Shed been twenty when she first arrived in the city. Back when she still had the energy to use a fake name, and still believed gestures like that had value, meant the things she was doing werent actually happening in her real life. Back when she kept lists: The names of the places she went with the men. Restaurants that charged for bread and butter. Restaurants that refolded your napkin when you went to the bathroom. Restaurants that only served steak, pink but flavorless and thick as a hardcover book. Brunches at mid-range hotels, with unripe strawberries and too-sweet juice, slurry with pulp. But the appeal of the lists wore off quickly or something about them started to depress her, so she stopped.Now Alex was no longer welcome in certain hotel bars, had to avoid certain restaurants. Whatever charm she had was losing its potency. Not fully, not totally, but enough that she began to understand it was a possibility. She saw it happen to others, the older girls shed known since moving here. They defected for their hometowns, making a grab at a normal life, or else disappeared entirely.In April: A manager had, in low tones, threatened to call the police after shed tried to charge dinner to an old clients account. Too many of her usuals stopped reaching out, for whatever reasonultimatums eked out of couples therapy and this new fad of radical honesty, or the first flushes of guilt precipitated by the birth of children, or just plain boredom. Her monthly cash flow fell precipitously. Alex considered breast augmentation. She rewrote her ad copy, paid an exorbitant fee to be featured in the first page of results. Dropped her rates, then dropped them again.Six hundred roses, the ads said. Six hundred kisses. Things only very young girls would want six hundred of.Alex got a series of laser treatments: flashes of blue light soaked her face while she looked out of tinted medical goggles like a somber spaceman. In the meantime, she had her photos redone by a twitchy art student who asked, mildly, whether she might consider a trade for services. He had a pet bunny that lurched around his makeshift studio, its eyes demonic pink.May: One of her roommates wondered why their Klonopin was dwindling so rapidly. A gift card had gone missing, a favorite bracelet. A consensus that Alex had been the one to break the window unit. Had Alex broken the window unit? She had no memory of it, but it was possible. Things she touched started to seem doomed.
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