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Summary
A New York Times Bestseller
A USA Today Bestseller
An Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2008
Melanie Stryder refuses to fade away. The earth has been invaded by a species that take over the minds of their human hosts while leaving the bodies intact, and most of humanity has succumbed.
Wanderer, the invading “soul” who has been given Melanie’s body, knew about the challenges of living inside a human: the overwhelming emotions, the too-vivid memories. But there was one difficulty Wanderer didn’t expect: the former tenant of her body refusing to relinquish possession of her mind.
Melanie fills Wanderer’s thoughts with visions of the man Melanie loves: Jared, a human who still lives in hiding. Unable to separate herself from her body’s desires, Wanderer yearns for a man she’s never met. As outside forces make Wanderer and Melanie unwilling allies, they set off to search for the man they both love.
Featuring what may be the first love triangle involving only two bodies, The Host is a riveting and unforgettable novel that will bring a vast new readership to one of the most compelling writers of our time.
Review Quotes
“Stephenie Meyer is an amazing phenomenon—out of the brightness of her mind and spirit comes the illuminated darkness of her stories. For no matter how much pain her characters suffer, Meyer infuses the tales with light and hope.”
Orson Scott Card
“A fantastic, inventive, thoughtful, and powerful novel. The Host should come with a warning label: it will grab you and keep you reading well into the wee hours of night and keep you thinking, deeply, hauntingly, well after the final word. Stephenie Meyer captures characters and handles story line like a master—a hybrid combination of Stephen King and Isaac Asimov.”
Ridley Pearson, New York Times bestselling author
“An epic story of love, family, and loyalty…The Host is The X-Files meets Days of Our Lives.”
USA Today
“Meyer is more interested in relationships than in flashy genre conventions…Meyer’s affirmative life lesson is disarming.”
Entertainment Weekly
“Meyer has, like one of her vampires, turned into something rare and more than merely human: a literary phenomenon…The way she manages the reader’s curiosity, maintaining tension and controlling the flow of information, is simply virtuosic…People do not want to just read Meyer’s books; they want to climb inside them and live there.”
Time
“A brilliant and fascinating premise…Its mix of adventure and new love on a new Earth is just right to get lost in this summer.”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (2008)
“Shines with romantic intrigue.”
Publishers Weekly
“Reading beautifully expresses the confusion of a creature who is accustomed to a certain compassionate detachment and who becomes quickly overwhelmed by the strong passions of her human encounter. These emotions drive Wanderer to seek out the loved ones whom Melanie left behind…delivers both emotional satisfaction and a somewhat morally ambiguous ending.”
AudioFile
“The Host lives up to the hype, blending science fiction and romance in a way that has never worked so well.”
Library Journal
“You might assume that Meyer’s bestselling Twilight series, about the intense love between a human teen and a vampire, takes the interspecies relationship thing about as far as it can go. There’s where you’d be wrong. Meyer’s ingenious adult-market debut, heavily but not tediously indebted to Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, imagines the tangled web of attachments between an alien parasite and the colony of humans to which the alien’s host body once belonged…The view of the apocalypse from the vantage point of one of its horsemen makes for propulsive reading, laden with unforgettable, unsettling scenes that raise fascinating questions about distinctions between essential human identity and its physical vessel. Consider buying duplicate sets of Meyer’s ouevre, one for adults and one for YAs, since this entertaining, somewhat soft-focus SF saga will only serve to broaden the penumbra of Meyer’s fame.”
Booklist
“Mature and imaginative…propelled by equal parts action and emotion…Its unabashedly romantic, and the characters (human and alien) genuinely endearing.”
Amazon.com, editorial review
“Host will likely appeal to readers interested in supernatural romance or character-driven science fiction. Questions of what defines humanity and love add a philosophical angle to an engaging and entertaining title.”
School Library Journal
Author Bio:
Stephenie Meyer is the bestselling author of the widely popular Twilight Saga. It all started on June 2, 2003, when the stay-at-home mother of three young sons woke up from a dream featuring seemingly real characters that she could not get out of her head. She invented the plot during the day then wrote it out late at night, when the house was quiet. Three months later she finished her first novel, Twilight. Twilight was one of 2005’s most talked about novels, and within weeks of its release the book debuted at number five on the New York Times bestseller list. The highly-anticipated sequel, New Moon, was released in September 2006 and has spent more than twenty-five weeks at the number-one position on the New York Times bestseller list. In 2007, Eclipse landed literally around the world and fans made the Twilight Saga a worldwide phenomenon. Meyer’s highly anticipated debut novel for adults, The Host, debuted at number one on the New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller lists. The Twilight novels have since been made into blockbuster films, launching Meyer even further into the spotlight. She lives in Arizona with her husband and three sons.
Additional Titles by the Author
Reader Bio:
Kate Reading is an Audie Award–winning narrator and has received numerous Earphones Awards from AudioFile magazine. She is also a theater actor in the Washington, DC, area and has been a member of the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company since 1987. Her work onstage has been recognized by the Helen Hayes Awards Society, among others. She and her husband live in Hyattsville, Maryland, with their two children.
