Welcome to the Read Like Mad book club!
📣 Hey book clubbers!
If you’re new to the club, you can subscribe for free to join and access club chats on the Substack app. Message your thoughts while you read!
Our May pick is The Guest by Emma Cline!
How I chose it:
The Guest seems to be one of those smoldering books which starts slow but then builds to an eruption of messiness. It’s been on fellow book clubber’s reading lists for awhile, and my own. Yesterday, at a birthday party I talked about books, a lot, helplessly, and got into a discussion about my love for slow and suspenseful stories. After reading an excerpt of The Guest and another excerpt, and feeling somewhat sleepy but then suddenly compelled and curious to read more, I thought this could be an alluring read for us busy bees.
Details:
Literary fiction, 320 pages, 2023
Synopsis:
“Alex drained her wineglass, then her water glass. The ocean looked calm, a black darker than the sky. A ripple of anxiety made her palms go damp. It seemed suddenly very tenuous to believe that anything would stay hidden, that she could successfully pass from one world to another.”
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 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.
Taut, propulsive, and impossible to look away from, Emma Cline’s The Guest is a spellbinding literary achievement.
Grab your copies of The Guest, in any form you wish, and let’s read baby!
I’ll see you in my chat (in the Substack app!) to discuss this book while we read during May!! Yay! Who’s in? Let me know in the comments. Have you read this? What did you think? Has The Guest been on your reading list?