"She didn’t belong, but she stayed."Alex is drifting. Banished from her sugar-daddy's beach house in the Hamptons, she spends a week squatting in borrowed identities,...

"She didn’t belong, but she stayed."

Alex is drifting. Banished from her sugar-daddy's beach house in the Hamptons, she spends a week squatting in borrowed identities, slipping into parties she wasn’t invited to, and hoping no one notices she has nowhere to go. The Guest is an unsettling, slow-burn psychological novel about disconnection, performance, and survival in the spaces between power and precarity.

With chilling restraint and hypnotic prose, Emma Cline delivers a story that asks: what happens when charm is all you have—and it stops working?

---

📗 In The Mood For…

Challenging My Views
Alex doesn’t inspire sympathy so much as discomfort. She’s not a lesson, she’s a question mark.
✅ Forces readers to sit with moral ambiguity and emotional unease
✅ Disrupts expectations of femininity, class, and likability without easy resolution

---

📘 Stories About…

Truth & Illusion
What is real in a world where everything is performed?
✅ Explores self-deception, shifting identity, and social façades
✅ Readers are left questioning what’s true and who Alex even is

Freedom & Constraint
Alex is technically “free,” but trapped by the roles she must play to survive
✅ Explores subtle, invisible constraints of class, gender, and economic dependence
✅ Tension arises from the need to manipulate social systems while being excluded by them