Don't miss Lucy Foley's new book, The Midnight Feast, coming June 18th!
A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST THRILLERS OF THE YEAR
“I loved this book. It gave me the same waves of happiness I get from curling up with a classic Christie...The alternating points of view keep you guessing, and guessing wrong.” — Alex Michaelides, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Silent Patient
"Evok[es] the great Agatha Christie classics…Pay close attention to seemingly throwaway details about the characters’ pasts. They are all clues.” -- New York Times Book Review
A wedding celebration turns dark and deadly in this deliciously wicked and atmospheric thriller reminiscent of Agatha Christie from the New York Times bestselling author of The Hunting Party.
The bride – The plus one – The best man – The wedding planner – The bridesmaid – The body
On an island off the coast of Ireland, guests gather to celebrate two people joining their lives together as one. The groom: handsome and charming, a rising television star. The bride: smart and ambitious, a magazine publisher. It’s a wedding for a magazine, or for a celebrity: the designer dress, the remote location, the luxe party favors, the boutique whiskey. The cell phone service may be spotty and the waves may be rough, but every detail has been expertly planned and will be expertly executed.
But perfection is for plans, and people are all too human. As the champagne is popped and the festivities begin, resentments and petty jealousies begin to mingle with the reminiscences and well wishes. The groomsmen begin the drinking game from their school days. The bridesmaid not-so-accidentally ruins her dress. The bride’s oldest (male) friend gives an uncomfortably caring toast.
And then someone turns up dead. Who didn’t wish the happy couple well? And perhaps more important, why?
Frequently asked questions
Yes, you can cancel anytime from the Subscription tab in your account settings on the Perlego website. Your subscription will stay active until the end of your current billing period. Learn how to cancel your subscription.
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
Perlego offers two plans: Essential and Complete
Essential is ideal for learners and professionals who enjoy exploring a wide range of subjects. Access the Essential Library with 800,000+ trusted titles and best-sellers across business, personal growth, and the humanities. Includes unlimited reading time and Standard Read Aloud voice.
Complete: Perfect for advanced learners and researchers needing full, unrestricted access. Unlock 1.4M+ books across hundreds of subjects, including academic and specialized titles. The Complete Plan also includes advanced features like Premium Read Aloud and Research Assistant.
Both plans are available with monthly, semester, or annual billing cycles.
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Yes! You can use the Perlego app on both iOS or Android devices to read anytime, anywhere â even offline. Perfect for commutes or when youâre on the go. Please note we cannot support devices running on iOS 13 and Android 7 or earlier. Learn more about using the app.
Yes, you can access The Guest List by Lucy Foley in PDF and/or ePUB format. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
Wild and Perfect: Playing with Contrasts in The Guest List
Lucy Foley on Writing Characters You Love to Hate
Reading Group Guide
Read On
An Excerpt from The Hunting Party
About the Author
Meet Lucy Foley
LUCY FOLEY studied English literature at Durham University and University College London and worked for several years as a fiction editor in the publishing industry. She is the author of The Book of Lost and Found, The Invitation, and The Hunting Party. She lives in London.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
About the Book
Wild and Perfect: Playing with Contrasts in The Guest List
I love weddings. Donât get me wrongâtheyâre wonderful occasions. But as someone in her early thirties, Iâve attended a LOT of them in the past few years . . . and as an author thereâs a sneaky little part of me thatâs always on the lookout for inspiration. And it occurred to me that a wedding might be the ideal setting for a murder mystery.
Youâve got old friends, newer friends, and family members all gathered together in one placeâand perhaps some hidden histories, buried secrets, and resentments bubbling away under the surface. Youâve got nerves and emotions running high, that expectation that everything has to turn out perfectly. Youâve got free-flowing alcohol, people leaving their inhibitions behind as they get into the swing of things.
And then thereâs all the stuff about how much it costs to get to the venue, the price of gifts on the registry, the angst over whether youâre at the good table or whether youâve been relegated to the one with all the weird uncles and oddballs, the anticipation of the drama that comes with the speeches; will they cross a line, go too far? I knew I could have a lot of (evil!) fun with all of it.
Then I decided Iâd dial up the tension a notch by setting this fictional wedding on an island so that I could trap all my characters together in one place and make sure all those tensions are dialed up a notch further. As a result, theyâre forced to look rather too closely at one another and at themselves. Of course, thereâs also the practical fact that when someone is murdered no one can escape, not even the killer . . .
I chose the west coast of Ireland for the setting. Itâs a beautiful part of the world, with white sands and turquoise waters and wildflower-strewn moors, totally the sort of place in which you might choose to get married. But itâs also very remoteâand the islands just off the coast are even more so. When I traveled to them on my research trip, I genuinely thought I might drown on the terrifyingly rough boat crossing over. Obviously, that had to go straight into the book itself!
Some of the islands off the west coast of Ireland used to be inhabited but are now desertedâas is the case with the fictional Cormorant Island in the bookâand when you listen to the wind howling through the ruined houses itâs hard not to think of ghosts. Standing looking out at the Atlantic Ocean you realize thereâs nothing between you and the North American continent except thousands of miles of water: a very isolating thought. Thereâs a real feeling of being cut off from the rest of the world, and a sense that it wouldnât be all that easy to get back . . .
I wanted the wildness of the island to form a contrast with the glamour and perfection of the wedding in the book: the big white tent, the no-expenses-spared catering, the magnificent spectacle of the wedding cake. Jules, the bride, is something of a perfectionistâand she expects everything to be perfect. But you canât control nature, and unbeknownst to any of them, a storm is approaching from far out in the Atlantic. A storm that will mirror the one taking place within the wedding party itself, with devastatingâand deadly!âconsequences.
As a civilization it feels as though we float somewhere between a kind of savage wilderness and our self-curationâthat perfect veneer we try to present to the outside world. I wanted to really play with that contrast in the book. On the one hand we have the wedding, which is really the ultimate facade of perfection. On the other we have the wilderness of the island, which gradually brings out a wildness within the characters themselves, revealing something violent and animal within as their masks fall away.
Lucy Foley on Writing Characters You Love to Hate
When I think about my favorite characters in thrillers, I realize theyâre often the âbaddies.â If I made a list it would have to include Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley, Villanelle in the books of the same name (Killing Eve in the TV version), and the unrepentant boyfriend-murdering Ayoola in My Sister, the Serial Killer. None of these are cardboard-cutout bad guys: theyâre witty, or sympathetic, or just downright charismatic. They even have elements we might recognize in ourselves. These are the kinds of characters Iâm drawn to create as a writer.
Donât get me wrong, I do enjoy writing âgoodâ characters: the ones the reader empathizes with and roots for and could even imagine themselves being friends with. But I also love writing the ones you love to hate. Those with guilty secrets, dark pasts, evil intentionsâcharacters that you resolutely dislike as a reader, but also find yourself more than a little fascinated by. Or you could flip it and say that some of these characters are those you hate to love: the ones you know you shouldnât like because theyâre deeply flawed in some wayâand yet find yourself drawn to in spite of those flaws.
As a writer I enjoy the challenge of creating characters that are perhaps objectively bad, but also compellingly so. I donât want the reader to be so appalled with them that they donât want to read on or fail to find anything to empathize with. Itâs an important balancing act. My test for myself when Iâm writing is: Do I want to spend a little more time in this personâs company? Am I having fun creating this character? If the answers are yes, then Iâm hopefully on the right track. Conversely, if I find myself increasingly turned off by them, then itâs unlikely the readerâs going to want to hang around long enough to find out what they have to say for themselves!
Of course, youâre likely to find more examples of this sort of love-to-hate figure in a murder mystery, in which everyone may have a motive to kill. A cast of badly behaved characters is pretty much a hallmark of the traditional murder mystery novel. In The Guest List, even those characters that I want the reader to actively likeâthat are on balance âgoodââarenât without their own secrets. I hope it makes them feel more rounded as characters to have that complexity.
Likewise, my characters that are on balance âbadâ arenât without their redeeming features, or without personal struggles and disappointments that we can empathize with. This, I think, humanizes them. I want the reader to have some level of understanding of their motivations, perhaps even to feel some degree of compassion for them. I never want to write mustache-twirling âevilâ villains: theyâre boring and not particularly believable. After all, no one thinks of themselves as the bad guy in their own narrative. Everyone can justify their own actions to themselves. Thatâs why I enjoy using the first-person point of view in my murder mysteries, so that my characters can tell their story to you, the reader, directly. Itâs confessional, intimate. This way you can really get inside their heads. Perhaps you might even beginâuncomfortablyâto understand their motivations.
None of us is perfect and without our own flaws, petty jealousies, uncharitable thoughts, so why should a character in a book be? That just wouldnât feel believable. Because, after all, arenât we all a little bit bad?
Reading Group Guide
Did you guess who the killer was? What (if any) clues did you pick up on throughout the book that helped contribute to your theory?
Throughout the story, weâre introduced to pairs of biological siblingsâJules and Olivia, Hannah and Alice, Aoife and her brotherâas well as characters who consider themselves like brothers, namely Will and his friends. How are each of these relationships different? What do you think the author is saying about the strength of biological family bonds versus the bonds of found families?
How did the setting add to your experience of the story? In what ways does the isolation affect each of the characters? Do you think things might have gone differently if they werenât brought together in such a remote location?
The Guest List is a modern take on the murder mystery. In what ways does Foley modernize and update the classic murder mystery?
Both Willâs and Julesâs best friends are friends from their youth. Why is this significant, and how does it affect the atmosphere of the wedding?
How reliable did you find the different narrators? As you were reading, did you trust what each narrator was saying? Did your opinion change as you read further?
There are several twists throughout the book. Which of these surprised you the most? Were there any you saw coming?
Many of the characters experience feeling like outsiders, whether at the wedding or at some point in their pasts. How does this affect their actions throughout the book and their relationships with others?
Who was your favorite character? Who was your least favorite? Was there one you related to the most?
âThis place is enough to make you believe in ghosts,â Hannah thinks while exploring the island. In what way do ghostsâmetaphorical and maybe even literalâcome back to haunt each of the characters?
Many of the characters commit crimes or do things that could be considered villainous, for very different reasons. Which characters did you empathize with, and which did you not feel sympathy for?
What did you think of the ending? Was justice served? Were you satisfied with where each of the char...
