Big Swiss

A Novel

By: Jen Beagin

Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman, Carlotta Brentan, Stephen Graybill, Joy Osmanski, Matt Pittenger

Length: 11 hrs and 16 mins

Publisher's summary

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.

©2023 Jen Beagin. All rights reserved. (P)2023 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.

One of my favourites

This and The Guncle are comedic gold. Excellent narration and story with the narration perhaps my favorite ever!

Fascinating characters

Original story with fascinating characters I didn’t know where the story was going sometimes funny sometimes sad sometimes sexual but the characters were fascinating

Trauma dumping

I really enjoyed it! The characters seemed true to themselves and the performance was great by the reader! I love that everyone has there own mental hurdle they need to get over. It was trauma dump after trauma dump. But if felt true to Greta to over share in that way. It also felt like a lot of Greta’s long monologs and rants she go on are super poetic in her description making it feel like she writing a letter instead of talking. really enjoyed it felt it did drag a little with the descriptions but loved the humor LOLed quite a lot!

Adventures of a Bitter Gen X Karen

I have mixed feelings about this book but most of my feelings can be boiled down to: huh? A generally unlikeable cast with a deeply unlikeable and at times unreliable narrator. Greta (the MC) is bitter, repressed, rude, likes animals over humans, makes racist jokes but mostly mentally, and starts an affair with a married woman who doesn’t seem to like her very much. I ended up getting hooked into the story but in the end it kinda feels like it was all for nothing. But Greta’s life feels like that, and she’s traumatized, so I guess that’s the point? Idk. Weird & disappointing w/ a couple questionable moments that gave me the ick.

All over the place and going nowhere

Performers did a great job. Story-wise I was excited for the premise here, it sounded like a rom-com setup but darker and more twisted. Post-listen, if you asked me what this book was about, I couldn’t tell you. Felt like the author changed their mind once or twice about what they were writing while they were writing it. An author can make up for this with great prose that is rewarding regardless of the story…this one doesn’t.

Such a unique story and characters

The plot was interesting and unexpected, I loved Greta and big Swiss, it was all weird and very real to me

Absolutely intoxicating

It’s been quite some time since a book drew me in like this. It’s beautifully written and is somehow epic and strangely ordinary at once… this book is a very beautiful piece and I will buy the physical book and read it again. I didn’t find it “funny” in terms of laughing out loud but rather funny in the way it illustrates human absurdities, which did make me smile. I couldn’t stop listening. It won’t be everyone’s cup of tea but it was most certainly mine.

Unique

Lovely prose, the performance of the voice actors was stellar and I found the use of therapy sessions as a tool to get inside the characters heads interesting. Not that it hasn’t be done before but I dunno. It was well done. And the descriptions of her house and the bees and her life in general just painted such a vivid image for me of who she was

Delightful surprise

Loved this book, had no idea what I was about to listen to, once starter it was difficult to stop. I listened to the whole thing in just 3 days. I Can’t wait to see film adaption!

Marvelous

So good I had to listen again from the beginning to fully appreciate how the author resolved the many threads woven throughout the story. Clever, taut use of symbolism & allegory elevates the experience. This book has it all: humor, pathos, snark, tension… A true literary achievement.