About the Book
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. In his pocket is a notebook filled with urgent reminders — but he can no longer read his own handwriting.
He’s travelling with his assistant. There will be a stopover in London, dinner with his adult daughter, a meeting in France with an old friend. His final destination: a clinic in Zurich.
As David glides through hotel rooms, airports and foreign cities, his grasp on the present slips away and the past rushes in.
With David’s arrival in Zurich looming, an exquisitely rendered portrait of an unravelling mind emerges. Hypnotic and moving, 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.
Format: Hardcover (352 pages) Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Publication date: 10th September 2026 Genre: Contemporary Fiction
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My Review
I don’t usually make a conscious effort to read books longlisted for the Booker Prize and I certainly won’t try to read them all this year as many don’t appeal to me. I admire people who manage to read the entire list and enjoy reading their thoughts which, in some cases, confirm my decision not to read a particular book. This year I’ve found myself with copies of several books on the list – May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry and The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout – and of course this one which I spotted on NetGalley.
The book is told entirely from David’s point of view as if we are inside his head, an increasingly bewildering place to be. The stream of consciousness style illuminates the confused state of his mind as his illness (never specifically identified) increasingly encroaches on his day to day experiences: the grasping for names and words that previously came to his lips without effort, the missing hours about which he can remember nothing, the sudden unfamiliarity with his surroundings, the occasional bursts of irrational anger. Everyday tasks that once came easily he now finds impossible to carry out, such as tying his shoe laces. There’s also the indignity of being reliant on others and the gradual sense that it’s not just his mind but his body that is failing him.
David finds it difficult to concentrate, his mind often throwing up fragments of song lyrics – several from The Sound of Music – or phrases learned as a child such as ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’, repeating these over and over again to himself, but possibly sometimes audibly. Every so often memories of events in his past come to the fore, including some of which he now feels ashamed. Faced with the prospect of death, he feels a compulsion to try to put things right, for example with his estranged daughter and grandson, and, in particular, with an old school friend, Tom. However, David’s current mental state, which includes a degree of paranoia, make such encounters fraught with difficulty.
The person trying to help David navigate this final journey is Cody, a young man employed as his assistant but on whom he is now reliant for almost every task. What David cannot perceive but we the reader can is how much Cody’s role goes beyond organising travel arrangements, making hotel and restaurant bookings, ensuring David is washed and dressed, and has taken his medication. It’s Cody who has to pick him up – literally – and who has to manage the consequences of David’s often disastrous interactions with others.
The novel also poses questions of vulnerability. Does David really possess sufficient mental capacity to make the decision to end his life? Are the tests to assess his mental capacity robust enough? The issue of medically assisted death for terminally ill people is currently in the news in the UK with Members of Parliament only days ago having narrowly rejected a Bill that would eventually make it legal.
The prospect of facing the sort of mental and decline that David experiences is a frightening one. This makes Switzy a tough read but, I think, an important and illuminating one rendered with considerable skill.
I received an advance reader copy courtesy of Vintage via NetGalley.
In three words: Moving, intimate, powerful
About the Author
Emma Cline is the New York Times bestselling author of 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’s John Leonard Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and the winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. Cline’s stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow, received the Plimpton Prize from The Paris Review and an O. Henry Award, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.
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