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An Unexpected Guest

A Novel

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An Unexpected Guest

By: Anne Korkeakivi
Narrated by: Ellen Archer
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About this listen

Clare Moorhouse, the American wife of a high-ranking diplomat in Paris, is arranging an official dinner crucial to her husband's career. As she shops for fresh stalks of asparagus and works out the menu and seating arrangements, her day is complicated by the unexpected arrival of her son and a random encounter with a Turkish man, whom she discovers is a suspected terrorist. More unnerving is a recurring face in the crowd, one that belonged to another, darker era of her life. One she never expected to see again. But it can't be him - he's been dead for 20 years....

Like Virginia Woolf did in Mrs. Dalloway, Anne Korkeakivi brilliantly weaves the complexities of an age into an act as deceptively simple as hosting a dinner party.

©2012 Anne Korkeakivi (P)2012 Hachette Audio Family Life Fiction Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Women's Fiction Marriage

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Critic reviews

"Anne Korkeakivi's writing has all the best qualities of an Ishiguro novel. Clare, a seemingly selfless diplomat's wife, the epitome of restraint and hermetic detachment, unravels before us into a woman of dangerous allegiances, passions, and moral dilemmas, in prose that is both beautiful and razor sharp. Paris is depicted with subtle complexity, a city that reposes as it threatens, full of scorn and grace. Korkeakivi's sense of detail is remarkable while grounded in authenticity. An Unexpected Guest is a feast of a novel." (George Hagen, author of The Laments)
"A taut, tender, suspenseful novel, delicately told." (Fernanda Eberstadt, author of Rat and The Furies)
"Anne Korkeakivi writes wonderfully about embassy manners, food, and Paris, and she writes even better about the darker world that threatens to disrupt not just Clare's seating plan for dinner but her entire life. An Unexpected Guest, like its heroine, is a novel of great elegance, enormous surprises, and unexpected depths." (Margot Livesey, author of The House on Fortune Street)
All stars
Most relevant  
Sloppy sentimental claptrap. Too much silly descriptions of her clothes and other incidentals. Did not enjoy

Not my kind of book

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