Our RealSAM BookClub September pick is The Guest by Emma Cline: a sweltering, unsettling, and beautifully written novel about a young woman navigating a world that was never meant to include her.
BookClub September Pick: The Guest by Emma Cline
The Guest was published in the UK by Chatto & Windus in 2023 and has since become one of the most discussed literary novels of recent years, named Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Time, NPR, the Financial Times, Harper’s Bazaar, and more.
Emma Cline is the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls, which was longlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. The Guest is her second novel, and it demonstrates exactly what critics mean when they praise her as “an astonishingly gifted stylist” (Brandon Taylor) and a writer with “something about her intimate tone, her talent for conjuring the feeling of being alive, that is entirely and uniquely her own” (Rachel Kushner).
What it’s About
Summer is ending on Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome. One misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she has been staying with sends her to the train station with a ticket back to the city.
With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but a gift for navigating the desires of others, Alex stays on the island. She spends the week before Labour Day drifting through the gated driveways and sun-blasted dunes of a world that is, at first, closed to her — moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake.
Cline never tells us quite who Alex is, or why she does what she does. The novel holds its centre back and asks the reader to sit with uncertainty. It is a short book (eight hours and thirty-six minutes) but dense with atmosphere and impossible to leave behind once started.
The audiobook is narrated by Carlotta Brentan.
Why We Chose This Book
We chose The Guest as our BookClub September pick because it’s a novel that gets better the more you think about it. The surface is gripping; propulsive, hot, slightly claustrophobic in the way a summer novel should be. Underneath it are questions about class, identity, and what it means to belong somewhere that don’t resolve cleanly.
We chose it because we thought it would generate the kind of disagreement that makes a BookClub discussion worth attending. Readers tend to feel very differently about Alex; some sympathise completely, some find her baffling, some are drawn in despite themselves. All of those responses are worth talking about.
It is also a genuinely manageable listen. Eight and a half hours is a length that can be finished in a week without it dominating everything else.
Join the RealSAM BookClub September Discussion
Our September discussion opens on 25 September inside the BookClub space.
As always, the discussion is relaxed and open. Whether you’ve listened to the whole book, part of it, or simply want to join the conversation, you are very welcome.
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Purchase a BookClub Membership
We look forward to hearing what you think when the discussion opens on 25 September.
Happy listening!
