Emma Cline is an auto-buy author for me — I went into this not knowing much. Wow. It is one of the best books I’ve read, but it also broke my heart. There is definitely a trigger if you’ve lost a loved one to dementia, which could make this very hard to read. I cannot get over how well Cline managed to get inside the head of an elderly man as he slowly forgets the world around him, but she did it so beautifully. We get the feeling that David is maybe not the greatest person, but we feel sympathetic toward him anyway as he crosses the Atlantic for dinner with his adult daughter, a meeting with an estranged old friend, and his final destination: an assisted suicide clinic in Zurich. It touches on so many things: mortality, what it feels like to know you are going to die and the world will be just fine without you, what happens when our accomplishments and titles fall away, and it’s just down to us and our relationships . . . I could go on. For me, it was a hard balance: wanting to compulsively read (would he actually go through with it? would his relationships mend?) while also feeling a bit heartbroken and a little haunted.
Read this if you loved: I’ve never read anything else like this, but if you liked The Girls and The Guest, you will like this.
