LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026 · From the bestselling author of The Girls and The Guest · Indian subcontinent edition
A private plane cuts through the winter night somewhere over Greenland.
David, a retired executive, leans back in his leather seat playing solitaire on his phone. The notebook in his jacket pocket is full of familiar phrases and urgent reminders to himself, but he is struggling to recognise his own handwriting. The world, once so knowable, has become a series of mysteries.
What David does know is this: Cody, his assistant, asleep in the next seat, will shepherd him through the journey. A stopover in London. Dinner with his grown-up daughter. A meeting in France with an old friend he hasn't spoken to in decades. And his final destination: Zurich.
As David drifts through hotel rooms, airports and foreign cities, running out the clock on his life, the present slips from his grasp and the past floods in — childhood Sunday roasts, stiff clothes worn only for church, a summer at a school friend's house, the losses and missteps that punctuate a life. What emerges is a portrait of an unravelling mind that is darkly funny and deeply moving, and a hypnotic inquiry into what a man is left with once his accomplishments, compromises and comforting illusions fall away. Mark Haddon calls it sublime; Daisy Johnson calls it her best book yet.
About the author
Emma Cline is the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of The Girls, the story collection Daddy and The Guest. Her stories have appeared in the New Yorker, Granta and the Paris Review. She received the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize and was named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.
Edition details
- Chatto & Windus paperback
- For sale in the Indian subcontinent only
- Published September 2026
