There’s one absolutely calamitous omission from this year’s Booker shortlist: Emma Cline’s Switzy. It’s the fantastically well-written story of a 70-year-old American businessman with advanced dementia flying to Switzerland to end his life in a euthanasia clinic, before he loses his marbles completely. David Hastings has wasted his life on work, not what matters most. He has let everybody down, including the estranged daughter he stops over in London to see. “Even before he’d actually lost his mind, he’d lost his mind”, he recognises too late.
None of these novels has as much to say about the way we live, and die, now as Switzy
