Switzy: A Novel
Not yet published: Expected Sep 8, 2026
A mesmerizing portrait of an aging man’s last pilgrimage, from the New York Times best selling 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.
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Community Reviews
I closed Switzy and immediately started writing down quotes.
Partly to remember, but mostly because I didn’t want to lose the feeling.
Emma Cline’s new novel, and a 2026 Booker Prize longlist finalist, follows David Hastings, a billionaire executive traveling to Zurich to end his life after being diagnosed with a terminal brain disease. Accompanied by his assistant, he plans to stop in London to see his estranged daughter and in France to visit someone from his past. The novel unfolds entirely insides David’s mind as memory clashes with present, dementia fractures his thoughts, and decades of ambition, regret, and loneliness begin to collapse into one another.
The premise sounds devastating. I actually tried to explain it to someone who asked me what I was reading yesterday and she was surprised when I said it wasn’t really “sad.” Instead of feeling sadness, I felt intimacy.
Cline writes from inside David’s deteriorating mind with such precision that I found myself slowing down to match his thinking. Words are misheard. Memories arrive out of order. Some thoughts feel oddly childlike. Others are laced with a dry, bitter humor. The effect isn’t confusing so much as deeply human. You’re never observing David from the outside; you’re experiencing the world as it slips through his fingers.
And then there was the sentence I haven’t been able to stop thinking about:
“A sad thought-that this chill would accompany him right to the end. David had already gotten his last sunny day and it had happened without him knowing it.”
I have read it multiple times.
And really, that’s true, isn’t it?
One day, each of us will have our last walk outside without realizing it. Our last phone call with a friend. Our last family dinner. Our last afternoon where nothing remarkable happened except the sun felt warm on our face.
There is no warning.
Life doesn’t tell us when something ordinary is becoming a memory.
As I read, my thoughts kept going back to my dad.
He had dementia towards the end of his life, and I found myself wondering if his thoughts were fracture like David’s. Did memories interrupt each other? Did he drift between decades without meaning to? Did he have any regrets? Did he feel alone?
The novel doesn’t answer my questions, but it somehow allowed me to ask them.
David spends much of the novel reflecting on the life he’s built-a life full of achievement but strangely empty of any real human connection. He’s divorced. Estranged from his only child and grandchild. Always with his assistant, but yet profoundly alone. It doesn’t read as punishment so much as a warning.
The things he spent his life chasing aren’t the things that stay with him.
Instead, the novel quietly asks what actually makes up a life.
One of my favorite observations:
“The ego churn in the room was almost a visible thing. What’s next, what’s next, what’s next-that was the hungry hum under everything.”
That restless question-what’s next?-feels so familiar.
The next promotion.
The next vacation.
The next project.
The next book.
The next milestone.
It’s so easy to spend a life preparing for the next thing that we miss the one we’re already living.
Like John Lennon said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
Another quote that stayed with me:
“She was distracted with her own living, that highly effective narcotic.”
Living is, in may ways, its own distraction. We go to work. Answer emails. Fold laundry. Sit in traffic. Scroll through TikTok. We keep ourselves busy enough that we rarely stop to consider how finite all of it is.
Maybe that’s a kindness.
Maybe it’s also why a book like Switzy has made such an impact.
After I finished reading, I listened to Haydn’s Farewell Symphony, which is mentioned in the novel. I expected something unbearably mournful. Instead, I was surprised by how lively it sounded. In a way, it reminded of the book itself. Even in a story about death, there is wit. There are moments of absurdity. There is beauty tucked inside in the decline.
Switzy also delivered one of my favorite literary surprises that I can remember. A relationship David has spent the entire novel romanticizing is quietly revealed to be something else entirely. I won’t spoil it here, but I admired how Cline never reached for melodrama. She simply let the truth settle.
The book didn’t make me feel hopeless, though.
It reminded me to:
Call my family.
Linger a little longer over coffee.
Not to pull away too soon from a hug.
To stop treating joy like something waiting for me on the other side of a checkmarked box.
Because one day, without any fanfare, we will have our last sunny day.
And for me, I want to make sure I’m present enough to notice the one we’re having today.
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