Emma Cline has a history of unsavoury protagonists. Her debut novel, The Girls (2016), took on a Manson-style cult; in The Guest (2023), she portrayed a 22-year-old sugar baby who was a compulsive liar and thief. Her latest is surprisingly ordinary in his unlikeability. Switzy follows David Hastings, a retired American business executive in his seventies. He looks like ‘any mild older man’. We meet him playing solitaire on a private plane. David is disconnected from family, immersed in a world of transaction and accompanied by a 24-hour assistant; he seems unremarkable. Yet what unfolds is an astoundingly original depiction of an interior life.

Tests have revealed amyloid plaque on David’s brain, a condition he mishears as ‘Amy Lloyd Plaque’ (‘I hate you, Amy Lloyd, he thought’). It is a sign of his worsening Alzheimer’s. The novel opens with David en route to meet his estranged adult daughter in London, a stopover on the way to a Swiss euthanasia clinic. He has few goodbyes to make. Yet in Cline’s telling, David’s plight is both startlingly moving and keenly funny.

Short paragraphs move between past and present. David meets his daughter, flies to Zurich and drives across the French border to see his old boarding-school roommate. All the while, Cline gives us the sense of a mind trying to stay in the world of the living. Phrases and memories surface