An Unexpected Guest

Time rained down on Clare. 8:30 a.m. on the clock hanging above the breakfast alcove. Twenty-five years of pretending Ireland never existed.

On a lovely spring day in Paris–post-9/11 and several months after the London Underground bombings–Clare Moorhouse, the Irish-American wife of a high-ranking British diplomat, 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 abrupt arrival of her son from boarding school in England and a disquieting encounter with a  man on the street. More unnerving still is a recurring face in the crowd, one that belonged to another, darker era of her life, long buried.

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.

Early Praise

“Anne Korkeakivi’s writing has all the best qualities of an Ishiguro novel…” – George Hagen, author of The Laments

“An Unexpected Guest, like its heroine, is a novel of great elegance, enormous surprises and unexpected depths.” – Margot Livesey, author of The Flight of Gemma Hardy

“Korkeakivi creates a Paris as crisp and unruffled as her heroine–and just as likely to surprise.” – Elizabeth Bard, author of Lunch in Paris: A Love Story with Recipes

“A beautifully written novel about living with our many selves.” – Nicola Keegan, author of Swimming

“A beautifully modulated first novel… Korkeakivi produces a knowing comedy of manners, a politically charged thriller and a genuinely moving study of the human heart.” – Kirkus Reviews, starred review, “New and Notable Fiction”

“Surprising…depth and magnitude… Korkeakivi fluidly fuses the past and the present…powerfully exploring whether redemption from past regrets is possible and the lengths one must go to attain it.” – Publisher’s Weekly, pick of the week