Switzy – Emma Cline

Published By: Chatto and Windus
Pages: 304
Released On: 10/09/2026

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 unravelling 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.

*****

Thanks to NetGalley and Chatto and Windus for the advanced copy of this title in return for an honest review.

This will be a shorter review than I normally do because, 1) it’s hard to review without spoilers, and 2) you’ll get more out of it if you go in fresh.

This is the first of Emma’s books for me and it sounded really intriguing.

The writing style was a bit stop-start, a lot of really short sentences, which I don’t have an issue with when they’re used sparingly among other sentence lengths, but this is predominately short sentences which made it have a weird, unnatural flow. It’s more of a complete stream of consciousness that didn’t really have a whole lot of meat on it.

It also has no speech marks which I dislike terribly.

I won’t spoil it by saying exactly what, but it’s clear from the synopsis that he is heading to Switzerland for “the thing” they do in Switzerland that you can’t do in other countries. And so Emma has given David a health battle and it’s a health battle I have familial experiencing with and I’ve never seen it mentioned in fiction before so that was a surprise. I think she’s been very sensitive about it, not hiding away from the difficult aspects but not making it so morbidly depressing.

It’s got a great premise and the depth she’s put into the emotional side of the story is impressive. I liked following the medical, more emotional moments, that interests me. I can’t say I overly disliked the rest, but I felt the writing style and sentence structure was wrong for a lot of it and there needed to be more of a variety of sentence lengths.

It reminded me of Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies because of the similar topic, although they were both approached very differently.

It was sad in parts and stressful, but there are hopeful moments, even if they are hidden among the more morbid aspects. Overall, I enjoyed it but I can’t say I loved it. I found her use of emotion and storytelling to be very good and this has definitely piqued my interest in terms of her other books.