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

"Tackling a subject as heavy as the end of a person's life as his grasp on himself and the world weakens is no small feat, but Cline handles it deftly, avoiding clichés and pat emotional catharses to explore both the weight and unburdening of a man's final days. This truly profound journey will stay with readers long after the last page is turned."--Booklist, starred review

"Brilliant prose exhibited on every page. Indeed, the novel's lucidity is remarkable considering the dimming of David's inner light, which Cline portrays with a laser focus and deep sympathy. It adds up to a striking meditation on mortality."--Publishers Weekly

"It's almost scary to think about what a convincing job Cline has done imagining this shattered form of consciousness, both near and far from what goes on in one's supposedly healthy brain. Unexpected, beautifully controlled, and almost dangerously captivating."--Kirkus Review, starred review

"Switzy has all the markings of another cool-as-a-cucumber Emma Cline novel. The Guest inaugurated the decisive beginning of her foray into the spare, distanced prose that she continues in spades here . . . Switzy promises to be incisive, empathetic, and searing as it burrows into the last moments of a man suddenly coming to terms with mortality and consequence."--Literary Hub

"I think quite frequently about the work of writer Emma Cline, whose fiction always seems to reveal the quiet tectonic shifts that occur just beyond the frame of disaster. Her almost wholesome California-girl beauty belies an imagination devoted to the dark corners of the American psyche, as though to silently reiterate that we can never know what's going on in another person's mind."--Cultured Mag

"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. 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

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.