An Unexpected Guest

A Novel

By Anne Korkeakivi (Hardcover Book, 2012)

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.

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.

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- Format: Hardcover Book
- Price: $24.99 US/$27.99 CAN
- ISBN-13: 9780316196772
- On Sale Date: 04/17/2012
- Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
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Formats Available: Hardcover Book, Trade Paperback, Electronic Book, Audiobook, Trade Paperback
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Anne Korkeakivi was born and raised in New York City but currently lives in Geneva, Switzerland, with her husband, who works at the United Nations, and two daughters. She has also lived in France, Finland, and a number of states in the Union, accumulating a B.A. in Classics and an M.A. in English and Comparative Literature. Her short stories have run in The Yale Review, The Atlantic, The Bellevue Literary Review, and other magazines.

"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).
"Serious geopolitics mixes with parenthood and the finer points of entertaining.... Like her protagonist, Korkeakivi's writing is cool, calm and composed." (Alison McCulloch, The New York Times).