This book has generated crazy amounts of hype: I feel like I've been hearing about it all year. Cline's story about a young girl drawn into a cult in 1960s California was inspired by Charles Manson and his followers. I started to read this as a potential Summer Reading Guide pick (first impressions: highly stylized, ambitious prose) and immediately realized it was too gritty for the guide, but I might pick it back up again this summer. Publication date June 14 2016.

From the publisher: "Summer is coming to a close on the East End of Long Island, and Alex is no longer welcome. A misstep at a dinner party, and the older man she’s been staying with dismisses her with a ride to the train station and a ticket back to the city. With few resources and a waterlogged phone, but gifted with an ability to navigate the desires of others, Alex stays on Long Island and drifts like a ghost through the hedged lanes, gated driveways, and sun-blasted dunes of a rarefied world that is, at first, closed to her. Propelled by desperation and a mutable sense of morality, she spends the week leading up to Labor Day moving from one place to the next, a cipher leaving destruction in her wake."