Emma Cline’s third novel arrives on the longlist with a quiet gravity that belies its devastating subject. Switzy follows David Hastings, a wealthy businessman navigating the final stretch of his life while grappling with the relentless erosion of his mind. The novel charts his journey from the United States to the United Kingdom and onwards to Zurich, where a medically assisted death awaits him at a facility reminiscent of Dignitas. Cline never once names the condition ravaging David’s cognition, yet the reader understands with chilling clarity what is unfolding. It is a profoundly moving work, one that alternates between moments of startling beauty and deep unease — and it asks uncomfortable questions about how we tell stories around suffering.
The Man Who Crossed the World
David Hastings is not a man who draws attention. He has spent his career as a chief financial officer for an unnamed corporation, a role in which he laboured behind the scenes, ensuring that certain figures rose while others fell. His wealth is considerable but not ostentatious; the private jet ferrying him across the Atlantic belongs to his employer, and its polished doors, which slide open “silently and obligingly,” mirror the frictionless existence he has cultivated. Yet there is a forensic accounting firm involved in his affairs, summoned to untangle the archipelago of overseas accounts he inadvertently scattered — an early signal of how thoroughly his faculties are disintegrating.
Accompanying him is Cody, his assistant, a constant presence as David makes his way from London City airport — which the novel, in a fitting irony, places amid the countryside — to visit his daughter and her family. From there, the route continues to Switzerland, with one final rendezvous awaiting over the French border: a reunion with Tom, an old boarding school companion from the 1960s. After that meeting, David will reach the clinic where his life will end.
Living Inside the Unraveling
Cline’s prose style becomes an extension of David’s deteriorating consciousness. The text fractures into atomised paragraphs, separated by generous stretches of white space — treacherous voids across which the thread of his awareness barely manages to stretch from one moment to the next. It is a formal choice that perfectly mirrors what David himself describes as a “mental ice floe, populated only by David, floating off into the polar darkness.”
The novel captures the indignities and disorientations of cognitive decline with unflinching precision. David has woken behind the wheel of his car with no memory of how he arrived there. He has soiled himself in public. He has upset colleagues and lost the ability to tie his shoelaces. Sometimes a burp, tasting of his midday meal, reminds him that he has eaten. At other times he walks into a room and finds it offering no explanation for his presence there. His world is saturated with aftermath, yet frustratingly devoid of cause.
Yet for all this chaos, Cline maintains a perfectly calibrated narrative machine behind the scenes. The prose remains smooth, controlled, and deeply intentional — as seamless as those jet doors. David’s stream of consciousness, rich in simile and fragmentary recollection, rebounds between his immediate surroundings and shards of memory. And as his comprehension thins, the reader’s deepens. We begin to catch the resonances he no longer can, creating a powerful and painful intimacy between us and a man slipping away.
The Shadow of Convention
There is, however, a tension that runs beneath the surface of this otherwise extraordinary novel. The storyline involving Tom — David’s old school friend — introduces a thread of revelation that feels conspicuously familiar. Throughout the text, clues surface about some shameful event from the 1960s that damaged the bond between the two men. One such clue involves Tom’s sister narrowing her eyes at David across the lawn during graduation. No further context is offered, for either character or reader, but the structure clearly primes us for a dramatic unmasking as the reunion draws near.
As the New Yorker critic Parul Sehgal observed in a 2021 essay on the genre, characters in trauma-plot novels “work to fill in the gaps of partial, haunting recollections.” David’s faltering memory conveniently aligns with this well-worn pattern. The memory remains tantalisingly out of reach, generating suspense, only to return precisely when narrative expectation demands it. The reader, conditioned by countless stories of this kind, anticipates the revelation — an expectation that runs directly counter to the reality of David’s condition, where neither storytelling logic nor real-world cause and effect holds any sway.
Once the novel moves beyond the Tom subplot, with roughly fifty pages remaining, it finds its truest voice. Freed from the obligations of dramatic disclosure, Cline immerses us fully in David’s pocked and impressionistic reality. Earlier in the book, when David loses the word for the small plastic tip on a shoelace — an aglet — he dismisses it with characteristic resignation: “that one was probably okay. Sure, toss it overboard.” It is a moment of dark, understated humour that captures the novel’s ability to find absurdity within tragedy.
The Last Pages
The closing chapters of Switzy mingle horror, beauty, absurdity, and a sense of profound finality in a way that lingers long after the last sentence. These pages represent the novel at its most confident and emotionally potent, unburdened by the need to deliver tidy resolutions. They honour the complexity of David’s experience — the way memory dissolves, the way identity fragments, the way a life accumulates meaning even as it slips beyond grasp.
Switzy is published by Chatto & Windus and retails at £18.99. It is a novel that earns its place on the Booker prize longlist through the sheer force of its emotional honesty and formal ambition.
Why it Matters
Switzy arrives at a moment when conversations around assisted dying, cognitive autonomy, and the stories we tell about dying are more urgent than ever. Cline’s novel does not offer easy answers, but it insists that we sit with the discomfort of a mind unspooling — and with the ethical weight of a society that permits some individuals to choose their own ending. By rendering David’s interior world with such precision and compassion, the book challenges us to consider what dignity means when memory fails, and whether any narrative — whether literary or cultural — can fully honour the experience of those living inside that silence. It is a work that will be discussed in literary circles and beyond for years to come.
