Switzy
By Emma Cline
Random House, August 11, 2026
A mesmerizing portrait of an aging man’s last pilgrimage, from the New York Times bestselling 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 knows: 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 in: 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.
Selected Praise for The Guest
“Under Cline’s command, every sentence as sharp as a scalpel, a woman toeing the line between welcome and unwelcome guest becomes a fully destabilizing force.”
—The New York Times
A Belletrist Book Club Pick
Vulture’s Inaugural “Beach Book Reads” Book Club Pick
Longlisted for the PEN/Faulkner Award
A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Vogue, Glamour, Newsweek, Good Housekeeping, Slate, Time Out, Chicago Public Library, Electric Lit, Bookreporter
“Cline’s writing at its very best—hypnotically propulsive, viscerally disquieting, and moving in the most unpredictable ways.” —Financial Times
“Sultry and engrossing, with a note of menace, [The Guest] [is a] gorgeously smart affair whose deceptive lightness conceals strange depths and an arresting originality.” —The Guardian
“Cline confirms her reputation as the literary prophet of women on the brink.”
—Esquire
“Pitch-perfect… Full of suspense and subterfuge… Cline has written a thriller about trying to get by, a summer read for the precariat.” —The Nation
“Cline quietly continues to be one of the best and most discomfiting young writers working today.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Cline generates an impressive amount of intrigue… The descriptions are frequently bracing and acute, sharpened to icepicks by a stance of amoral neutrality.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“A wonderfully suspenseful examination of luxury, delusion, class and fear.”
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
“Young, beautiful Alex is…a grifter wandering through a pricey, dreamlike summer playground looking for her next mark. Cline’s exquisite writing makes us care in spite of ourselves.” —People
“Enthralling… Who needs living when you’ve got The Guest in your bag?” —Jezebel
“Emma Cline serves glitz and unease.” —Vanity Fair
“In her first novel since 2016’s runaway hit The Girls Emma Cline returns with another story of sex and manipulation…” —Philadelphia Inquirer
“A smoldering thriller that explores desire and deception.” —The Washington Post
“[Cline has] skill with language…[and] shimmering insights into complexities of womanhood and desire.” —Los Angeles Review of Books
“Cline is a master of depicting the nefarious and atmospheric menace that often lurks adjacent to our most glittery environments, and she does so here with subdued but no less cutting aplomb.” —Vogue
“Eerily captivating.” —Elle
“Cline weaves through settings and characters with intentional disorientation, shifting ever darker, ever more suspenseful… Cline proves herself to be one of the boldest, most complicated writers working today.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Emma Cline’s The Guest…offers a sharp, nuanced approach to an outwardly frothy premise, submerging her readers in an anxiety-ridden world where class struggle seethes under the surface…” —TIME
“An intoxicating, sun-drunk work that tells the story of a hand-to-God grifter, one whose head you’re both terrified of and want to bask in forever, until you wake up sunburnt to a crisp.” —Nylon
“Galvanizing and so utterly readable. The reader, who ingests the novel’s sumptuous atmosphere and the thrill of trespass captured in Cline’s sharp, tense prose, is implicated alongside the protagonist.” —The Millions
“Her odyssey of desperation and misadventures feels like Barry Lyndon for Gen Z.”
—BuzzFeed
“Will keep your blood pressure as high as if you were following a serial killer stalking their next victim.” —Paste
“I loved every moment of The Guest: the intensity, the control, the atmosphere, the psychological escalation…the way it lets nobody off the hook and yet is not without deep humanity.” —Sam Lipsyte, author of No One Left to Come Looking for You
“The pathology brilliantly observed by The Guest would not feel so edgy if it were not perilously close to an aspirational ideal.”—Geoff Dyer, author of Out of Sheer Rage and Homework
About the Author
Emma Cline is the New York Times-bestselling author of the novels The Girls and The Guest and the story collection Daddy. The Girls was a finalist for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. It was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and won the Shirley Jackson Award. Cline’s stories have been published in The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and The Best American Short Stories. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow, received The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize and an O. Henry Award, and was chosen as one of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists.
Buy This Book