Emma Cline is best known as the author of novels about troubled young women. The Girls, her debut, inhabited a follower of a Charles Manson figure, who opted out of the murders at the last minute. Her second, The Guest, followed a callow beauty who’d attached herself to a wealthy man for accommodation.
Switzy, her third novel, longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, turns to a different kind of protagonist. The novel follows an elderly American man making a final journey to Switzerland. The way to Golgotha? A last hurrah? Readers can quickly guess Switzerland is the place where David Hastings, our narrator, plans to end his life before his accelerating Alzheimer’s disease robs him of total agency.
