The Guests by Agnes Ravatn (translated by Rosie Hedger)

Happy New Year everyone! Hope you are all well, had a great Christmas if you celebrated and have had a good start to 2024. In true Suze Reviews style, I will be sharing my end of year review late. 😂 But in the meantime, I have a review for you lovely people! Today I'm helping to open the blog tour for The Guests by Agnes Ravatn and translated into English by Rosie Hedger. My thanks to Anne Cater at Random Things Tours for inviting me and to the publisher for my review copy.

The Blurb

An exquisitely dark, sharply funny psychological drama by the international bestselling author of The Bird Tribunal.

It started with a lie…

Married couple Karin and Kai are looking for a pleasant escape from their busy lives, and reluctantly accept an offer to stay in a luxurious holiday home in the Norwegian fjords.

Instead of finding a relaxing retreat, however, their trip becomes a reminder of everything lacking in their own lives, and in a less-than-friendly meeting with their new neighbours, Karin tells a little white lie…

Against the backdrop of the glistening water and within the claustrophobic walls of the ultra-modern house, Karin’s insecurities blossom, and her lie grows ever bigger, entangling her and her husband in a nightmare spiral of deceits with absolutely no means of escape…

The Guests is published (in English) by Orenda Books and comes out on 18th January 2024.

My Review

This is the first book by Agnes Ravatn that I've read, (although you can find an extract from The Seven Doors here), so went into this not knowing what to expect, which is always an adventure! The first thing I noticed was that Ms Ravatn doesn't use speech marks around dialogue. It's not the first time I've seen this, of course, although I tend to avoid it. So it threw me a little and I wasn't sure I could enjoy the book but was surprised how quickly I forgot about it and got involved in the story. 

Karin and Kai's two boys are staying with their grandparents so the adults have a week to themselves and have been offered the use of a cabin on the coast. When I say cabin I don't mean a basic log affair but a luxury one with top quality furnishings. It will be a bit of a working holiday for Kai but with plenty of time to enjoy himself. But Karin is strangely reluctant to head to this coastal idyll. However, she does, and on a walk one day encounters their nearest cabin dwelling neighbour Per, and tells a small lie. But as they interact more with Per and his wife, the lie becomes  bigger and bigger...

I struggled to warm to Karin, I must admit. I understood some of her insecurities but not others, and thought she probably wasn't the most likeable of people. All that said, for a large portion of the book she isn't herself, and she never relaxes, so that will all be part of it. Kai, on the other hand, is wonderfully relaxed and laid back, and very likeable, regardless of the face he wears. Per and Hilma  were very interesting characters - initially slightly closed off, as they open up a bit more we find out their outwardly lovely life is not without its problems. 

All the action is centred around these four characters and takes place in the two cabins and surrounding area, other than a bit of backstory, so there is a bit of a claustrophobic feel to things. The area sounds beautiful, though, the scene setting is descriptive and vivid. The storyline pulls us along as the lie gets bigger and I was dying to see how it all ended up. And that ending wasn't what I expected at all. 

The Guests is a really interesting study of emotional fragility and the feelings we get that somehow we're not enough. It's also a cautionary tale about lying, and where that can lead you! An interesting, funny, well written and very enjoyable book, and a slightly different kind of read for me, and that can only be a good thing! 

The Author

Agnes Ravatn is a Norwegian author and columnist. She made her literary debut with the novel Week 53 in 2007. Since then she has written a number of critically acclaimed and award-winning essay collections, including Standing, Popular Reading and Operation Self-discipline, in which she recounts her experience with social-media addiction. Her debut thriller, The Bird Tribunal, won the cultural radio P2’s listener’s prize in addition to The Youth’s Critic’s Prize, and was made into a successful play in Oslo in 2015. The English translation, published by Orenda Books in 2016, was a WHSmith Fresh Talent Pick, winner of a PEN Translation Award, a BBC Radio Four ‘Book at Bedtime’ and shortlisted for the Dublin Literary Award and the 2017 Petrona Award for Best Scandinavian Crime Novel of the Year. Critically acclaimed The Seven Doors was published in 2020. Agnes lives with her family in the Norwegian countryside.