Emma Cline '13 Publishes New Novel, ‘The Guest’

In The Guest, the latest book from Emma Cline ’13, summer is coming to a close.

Cline’s novel follows Alex, who is no longer welcome on the East End of Long Island. 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.

“The Guest displays exactly these seemingly separate facets: Emma’s razor-sharp power of observation and an ability to synthesize feelings and emotions mixed with a deep well of empathy and understanding that makes her a unique force,” Louise Bonnet said in her conversation with Cline for Interview Magazine. “She is willing to let the winding undercurrent of life and friendship be what matters, and so it is thrilling to know and read her.”

Cline also discussed the process of writing The Guest with Bonnet:

“I think a lot of [the process] is [asking], is the tone right?” Cline said. “What is the book’s emotional tone? It’s like the feeling when you go out in an outfit that you thought looked good at home and then it’s just horrible once you’re in the world. Certain things are just so wrong and it just feels wrong on a deep level. And I guess I do see it, not in terms of shapes maybe, but there’s a tension that I’m after. And it’s a balance. ‘Okay, does this scene maintain the tension? Is it draining? Is it going slack, suddenly? Do I need to plug something else in that will activate it in a different way?’ You are sensing your way towards a certain productive tension.”

Called “a smoldering thriller that explores desire and deception” by The Washington Post, The Guest is a must-read. Click here to read more about the novel and purchase your own copy.

Emma Cline is the author of The Girls, the story collection Daddy, and The Guest, her latest novel, which was published on May 16, 2023. The Girls was an international bestseller as well as a finalist for a National Book Critics’ Circle Award, the First Novel Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was also the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. The winner of the Plimpton Prize, Cline was also named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists. In 2021, she won an O. Henry Prize for “White Noise.” Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Granta and The Best American Short Stories.