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H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. An extraordinary book, at once smart, gripping and hallucinatory' OBSERVER _ A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a holiday: a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they've rented for the week. The answers will be in the discussions about the book, or rather, attempts at answers.*A THE TIMES #1 BESTSELLER* *THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER* *A BARACK OBAMA SUMMER READING PICK 2021* 'Easily the best thing I have read all year' KILEY REID, AUTHOR OF SUCH A FUN AGE 'Intense, incisive, I loved this and have still not quite shaken off the unease' DAVID NICHOLLS 'I was hooked from the opening pages' CLARE MACKINTOSH 'Simply breathtaking. This book would be a great one to discuss in a book group, because it raises a lot of questions and answers none. The point is to raise questions about society: how does it function and why? Are the things we spend our time on really important? What if things suddenly changed, would the same things be important or would we change our priorities? What does it mean to be a good person? I am not going to lie, the answers to these questions are not in the book that’s not the point. What if all the things we count on in the modern world just stopped working? What if something happened, but there was no news about what it was or who had done it, or how long it would last? What if our phones no longer brought us alerts and information? First, the owners of the Airbnb show up asking to stay in the house with Amanda and Clay, because of a mysterious power outage in the city. Soon, things take a turn toward the dark side. There is also a little head hopping, which while sometimes unsettling, contributes to the frantic tone and builds the humming anxiety that drives the characters.

In the style of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, the brand names are intentionally dizzying in frequency, which serves to ground the reader in Amanda’s material and materialistic world. The opening of the novel is a little jarring. Is it sexist that Clay always drives, does she care? Do her kids fit in, are they going to be successful, is she successful, does she like her job as much as she is supposed to? The list goes on. She and Clay have the requisite two children, a boy and a girl, and Amanda worries about all the normal things a privileged white woman of our time worries about. Amanda and her family are on the way to their Airbnb in the wilds of Long Island.