Switzy - by Emma Cline (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE - A mesmerizing portrait of an aging man's last pilgrimage, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Girls and The Guest.

A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. The notebook in his jacket pocket is filled with familiar phrases, urgent reminders to himself, but he struggles to recognize his own handwriting.

A mystery, among many mysteries. The world, once so knowable, has been rendered inscrutable.

This is what David knows: Cody, his assistant, asleep in the seat next to him, will shepherd him along the voyage. A stopover in London. Dinner with his adult daughter. A meeting in France with an old friend, estranged for decades.

His final destination is Zurich.

David glides through hotel rooms and airports and foreign cities, running out the clock on his mortal life. His grasp on the present slips away, and the past rushes in: the Sunday roasts of childhood. The stiff clothes meant only for church. A summer at a school friend's house. The losses and missteps that punctuate a life.

As David's arrival in Zurich looms, an exquisitely rendered portrait of an unraveling mind emerges, both darkly humorous and profoundly moving. Hypnotic and startlingly original, Switzy probes the depths of human consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and compromises that have defined him, and the illusions he's relied on, vanish.

Review Quotes

"We live in a time ruled by overpowered and undersocialised wealthy boy kings; Emma Cline's mordant novel considers what, if anything, remains at the end of one such luxurious yet lonely life. David is a retired American business executive with dementia who decides to be euthanised in a Swiss clinic. As he voyages across Europe, fuzzy memories from his life slip in and out of his consciousness. There are final gestures towards intimacy with family and friends, and a whimsical cartoon becomes a symbol of a bygone childhood. What makes a life? Cline writes vividly about the trappings of the elite--the private jets, the heirloom watches, all that time spent in the office--as well as their sad social cost in a story that feels immersive, elegiac, and very real. As one of us put it: 'I travel a lot, and know these guys.'"--2026 Booker Prize judges

Praise for Emma Cline

"Under [Emma] Cline's command, every sentence [is] as sharp as a scalpel."--The New York Times

"Cline sees the world exactly and generously. On every other page, it seems, there is something remarkable."--The New Yorker

"One of the boldest, most complicated writers working today."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Cline is a master of depicting the nefarious and atmospheric menace that often lurks adjacent to our most glittery environments."--Vogue

"Cline's fiction is full of binaries pressing up against one another; youthful promise and life's realities; success and failure; darkness and humor."--The Wall Street Journal

"One of the best and most discomfiting young writers working today."--Entertainment Weekly

About the Author

Emma Cline is the New York Times bestselling author of The Guest, The Girls, and the story collection Daddy. The Girls was a finalist for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was a New York Times Editor's Choice and was the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. The Guest was longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award. Cline's stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories anthologies. She received an O'Henry Award and the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review, and was chosen as one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.