Emma Cline's Booker-longlisted 'Switzy' traces a tycoon's final journey to Zurich
Emma Cline's third novel, Switzy, has been longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize and arrives on shelves next month — but the story it tells is already drawing notice for how quietly devastating it is.
The novel centres on David Hastings, a wealthy former chief financial officer whose mind is slipping. He never names the illness, but the condition is Alzheimer's disease. Hastings borrows a private jet and flies from the United States to the United Kingdom with his assistant, Cody, to visit his daughter. From there he travels to Zurich — hence the title — and on to a euthanasia facility resembling Dignitas, the Swiss organisation that assists terminally ill people to end their lives. One more appointment, across the French border, precedes the final stop. The Booker Prize's own judges called Switzy "Emma Cline's mordant novel" that "considers what, if anything, remains at the end of one such luxurious yet lonely life" (the Booker Prize website).
Cline is an American author whose earlier books include The Girls, Daddy, and The Guest. Columbia University's School of the Arts, where Cline graduated in 2013, announced in February that she would publish Switzy with Random House, her US publisher, in September 2026 (Columbia School of the Arts). The US edition runs 352 pages and lists at US$32.00. In the United Kingdom, the novel is published by Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Penguin Random House (the Guardian), with a recommended retail price of £18.99. The US edition is scheduled for publication on 8 September 2026.
The Booker longlist announcement came on 28 July 2026. The Guardian's coverage at the time described Switzy as taking readers inside the mind of a high flyer whose grip on the world is failing as dementia encroaches (the Guardian, 28 July 2026). The Booker Prize's official description calls it "a mesmerising portrait of an ageing man's last pilgrimage" (the Booker Prize website).
On 31 August 2026, the Guardian published a review calling Switzy "a perfectly calibrated narrative machine" and "profoundly moving" (the Guardian, 31 August 2026). The review draws particular attention to Cline's form: atomised paragraphs separated by white space, a visual rhythm that mirrors Hastings's failing awareness. The word "Alzheimer's" never appears on the page. The structure does the diagnosis for her.
For readers, the timing matters. A Booker longlisting — 13 titles chosen from a large submission pool by a rotating panel of judges, the longlist is the prize's first cut before the shortlist and winner — arrives weeks before publication, giving a novel momentum that no marketing budget can replicate. Cline's novel will be in shops on both sides of the Atlantic just as the Booker conversation intensifies. The shortlist follows later in the autumn; the winner is announced at a ceremony in London.
