NATIONAL BESTSELLER AND CULT FAVORITE Named a Best Book of the Year by the New Yorker, Time, NPR, Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Huffington Post, NBC News, Lit Hub, theSkimm, Condé Nast Traveler, Town & Country, and more! “One of the funniest books of the last few years” (Los Angeles Times) about a sex therapist’s transcriptionist and her affair with one of the patients. Greta lives with her friend Sabine in an ancient Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York. The house is unrenovated, uninsulated, and full of bees. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach who calls himself Om. She becomes infatuated with his newest client, a repressed married woman she affectionately refers to as Big Swiss. One day, Greta recognizes Big Swiss’s voice in town and they quickly become enmeshed. While Big Swiss is unaware Greta has eavesdropped on her most intimate exchanges, Greta has never been more herself with anyone. Her attraction to Big Swiss overrides her guilt, and she’ll do anything to sustain the relationship… “A fantastic, weird-as-hell, super funny novel” (Bustle), Big Swiss is both a love story and a deft examination of infidelity, mental health, sexual stereotypes, and more—from an amazingly talented, singular voice in contemporary fiction.

Big Swiss was a fun book. It's absurd and crazy in places, but Beagin does a very good job grounding it in her setting (Hudson, NY) and her premise (a stenographer of a sex therapist gets obsessed with a voice she hears in the recordings she's transcribing.) Perhaps Beagin's greatest trick in this novel is the way she sets the tone for Hudson; there are so many wacky characters and events (the beehive in Sabine's house, the incidents in the dog park, the collision of the poor and rich) that could easily suspend disbelief, but Beagin creates Hudson as a wacky small town that makes all of it believable in the context of that place. Also, having the main character Greta work for Om, a completely unethical sex therapist, gives Beagin a great vehicle to get information about characters out into the story without tripping over realistic details of professional standards or confidentiality. The book centers around the affair that Greta starts with Flavia, one of Om's patients, after Greta listens to her sessions. The relationship is simultaneously powerful, silly, and disturbing, and much of the novel lives in the ambiguity. There's a lot of very funny parts in Greta's observations about Hudson or Sabine's antics or Om's incompetence, but these are cut next to shocking acts of violence from Flavia's sexual assault to her husband's sudden stabbing in a bar. This all sounds tonally schizophrenic, but Beagin weaves it together into a story that remains fun to read and at the same time carries the possibility of redemption. Greta and Flavia are both quite young and the story is as much about them making crazy romantic mistakes that they have to learn from than anything else. There's some earned growth on Greta's part in the novel and that sends the book off on a good note. Well done, Jen Beagin. Thank you for a fun rollercoaster of a story.