Emma Cline's new novel explores dementia through the mind of a man planning to
In Switzy, longlisted for the Booker Prize, Cline follows an elderly American man with accelerating Alzheimer's journeying to Switzerland to end his life.
Emma Cline has built her career writing about troubled young women. Her debut The Girls followed a follower of a Charles Manson figure; her second, The Guest, tracked a woman who attached herself to a wealthy man.
Switzy shifts to a different world: an elderly man losing his grip on memory and agency. The novel traces David Hastings as he travels from the United States to Zurich, where he plans to end his life at an assisted-dying clinic before Alzheimer's erodes his total control.
Along the way, he visits his daughter in London and reconnects with Tom, a boarding-school friend he has not seen for decades. Cline focuses less on the ethics of his decision and more on how we construct our own narratives and what happens when memory begins to fail us.
David's cognitive decline forces him to revisit his boarding-school years, including a cruel prank he witnessed but did nothing to stop. When he finally apologises to Tom, the reunion upends David's decades of guilt.
The novel is formally impressive too: Cline's prose mimics the repetitive, associative quality of David's thinking, with fragments of songs and half-remembered phrases recurring to depict dementia on the page.
- Longlisted for the Booker Prize
- Literary recognition
- David Hastings
- Protagonist
- Zurich, Switzerland
- Destination
- Alzheimer's disease
- Condition
Why it mattersThe novel explores how the stories we tell ourselves about our lives can matter more than the actual facts, and what happens when illness strips away our ability to control that narrative.
AustraliaA new literary work by a significant contemporary novelist longlisted for a major international prize, available for Australian readers.
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