The Guest List
On a rocky, storm-lashed island off the Irish coast, a celebrity wedding is assembling for a long weekend. The groom is the charismatic host of a hit survival show, the bride runs a glossy online magazine, and the guests include a bridesmaid who is hiding something, a plus-one who was not invited, the groom's old boarding-school friends who have never quite grown out of their cruelty, and a wedding planner whose own family grief is knotted to this island. By the end of the first night someone is dead in the marsh. Lucy Foley spools her novel backward and forward through the days around the wedding, letting each narrator withhold what the next reveals. It is a tight, compulsively readable homage to classic closed-circle mysteries, remade for the age of Instagram and podcast true crime.
Where The Guest List keeps showing up
Seven of our editors' lists feature this novel.
What you might want to know about The Guest List
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A magazine publisher and a reality TV star marry on a windswept island off the Irish coast, with the wedding party housed in a converted folly. Across the bridesmaid, the wedding planner, the plus-one, and the best man, old grudges surface, the storm closes in, and a body turns up by morning.
The most commonly searched is The Guest List by Lucy Foley (2020), a destination-wedding murder mystery. The metadata above lists Fern Michaels in error.
Yes. Hulu and ABC announced a TV adaptation. As of 2025, the project remains in development.
The Guest List is 400 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, The Guest List takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
The Guest List is a standalone novel by Fern Michaels, not part of a series.
The Guest List is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
