Switzy by Emma Cline is a 352 page standalone novel being published today, September 8, 2026, by Random House.

Genre

Literary Fiction

Description

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 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 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

Opening Line

It was always nighttime there.

My Thoughts

A literary novel about a man with progressing dementia pursuing assisted suicide.

Leave the party right when you think, I’m having such a nice time at this party. Because after that…[it] could only go downhill.

This is an uneasy story about David seeing to a few last things before voluntarily shuffling off this mortal coil before his mind deteriorates any worse than it already has. Perhaps not making amends so much as just acknowledging that mistakes were made.

The telling is somewhat disjointed in a stream of consciousness type style, and of course this stream is a bit rockier than most. It’s pretty well done, although it did start to lag a tiny bit for me in the middle.

This emotional work falls somewhere between 4 and 5 stars for me. The biggest factor pulling it down from 5 for me is that David, though the reader sympathizes with his plight, seems to never have been a particularly likable person. Hard to love spending that much time in his head as a result. And I wished for a tad more closure in regards to one particular character, but how to do so without making it trite is not something I could explain how to do (but hey, I’m not the author!) (But also, the author made their choices about how to handle the various facets of the story, and they don’t all have to jive 100% with every reader, which of course is not possible anyway.)

Overall an important piece of work that will likely make you reflect on aspects of your own life as you have lived it.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the eARC in exchange for my unbiased review.