The Guest by Emma Cline review – a stylish follow-up to The Girls
A young escort searches for security among the leisured wealthy in Cline’s clever study of precarity and excess
‘I was a bad child actor. Extremely bad’: Emma Cline on the follow up to her hit novel The Girls
The novelist talks about the power of being an outsider, growing up in a family of seven siblings – and exploring the Hamptons in her first novel since her Manson-inspired bestseller
Book of the day
The Guest by Emma Cline review – strange depths and an arresting originality
The Girls author’s smart, menacing tale of a young female serial deceiver succeeds as a treatise on sex and alienation and an engrossing beach read
March 2022
Top 10s
Top 10 novels about toxic friendships
Complex attachments mixing intimacy and deception can decide whole lives, and have inspired novelists from William Thackeray to Elena Ferrante
April 2021
Books that made me
Emma Cline: ‘Reading anything because you “should” doesn’t make sense to me’
The author on books that inspire a ‘slight hallucinatory vibe’ in her own writing, the wonders of Richard Scarry, and rereading Jeffrey Eugenides
September 2020
Book of the day
Daddy by Emma Cline review – among the hollow men
Cline’s follow-up to her notorious debut, The Girls, explores the insecurities of powerful people in a post-#MeToo world
August 2020
Emma Cline: 'We are forced to imagine what’s going on in the minds of men'
The author of The Girls talks about Weinstein, weathering a plagiarism allegation and her new short story collection, Daddy
July 2020
From Donna Tartt to Irvine Welsh: 10 great novels about friendship
Urban junkies, competitive mothers, adolescent girls caught in the world of Charles Manson ... Lara Feigel picks her 10 favourites
June 2019
Top 10s
Top 10 books about cults
From fiction by Margaret Atwood to Haruki Murakami’s reportage, novelist Claire McGlasson picks favourite accounts of these ambitious, dangerous sects
May 2019
Top 10s
Top 10 teenage friendships in fiction – from Dickens to Ferrante
From Great Expectations’s Pip and Estella to My Brilliant Friend’s Elena and Lina, these volatile years have inspired many brilliant novels
August 2018
Top 10s
Top 10 cliques in fiction
From the droogs in A Clockwork Orange to Donna Tartt’s murderous classicists in The Secret History, these intense friendships often involve bullying, rivalry and obsession
July 2018
Emma Cline's ex-boyfriend's copyright claim dismissed
Chaz Reetz-Laiolo had alleged that her bestselling debut novel The Girls stole from his writings
December 2017
Bestselling books of 2017: the top 100
Ask Hadley
Emma Cline’s plagiarism suit – just another story of a man acting terribly
November 2017
Emma Cline countersues after ex claims she used spyware to plagiarise his work
Author of The Girls is being sued by former boyfriend, who alleges that her bestselling novel about a Manson-style cult uses material from his own writing
May 2017
Observer New Review Q&A
Emma Cline: ‘It was exhausting, even in fiction, to remember being a teenager’
Granta: Best of Young American Novelists 3 – review
April 2017
The age of anxiety: what does Granta’s best young authors list say about America?
Granta’s list of the best young American novelists
November 2016
Best books of 2016
Best books of 2016 – part two
Paula Hawkins reflects on guilt, Jackie Kay seeks hope post-Brexit, and David Nicholls is lured into the lonely city … writers pick their best books of 2016
