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The Swiss Affair, by Emylia Hall
Free PDF The Swiss Affair, by Emylia Hall
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From the highly acclaimed author of The Book of Summers comes a tale of love, lies and innocence lost
For Hadley Dunn, life has been predictable and uneventful. But that is before she spends her second year of college abroad in Lausanne, a glamorous Swiss city on the shores of Lake Geneva. Lausanne is imbued with the boundless sense of freedom Hadley has been seeking, and it is here she meets Kristina, a beautiful but mysterious Danish girl. The two bond quickly, but as the first snows of winter arrive, tragedy strikes.
Driven by guilt and haunted by suspicion, Hadley resolves to find the truth about what really happened that night, and so begins a search that will consume her, the city she loves, and the lives of two very different men. Set against the backdrop of a uniquely captivating city, The Swiss Affair is an evocative portrayal of a journey of discovery and a compelling exploration of how our connections—with people, with places—make us who we are.
- Sales Rank: #2520956 in Books
- Published on: 2014-01-28
- Released on: 2014-01-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.26" h x 1.00" w x 5.42" l, .60 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Review
"Hall deftly captures Hadley's transformation, set against the beautiful canvas of a picturesque Swiss city."-Publishers Weekly on The Swiss Affair
"Breathtaking... Readers will appreciate the solid, artistic, beautifully descriptive quality of Emylia Hall's writing." -Bookreporter.com on The Book of Summers
"Tender and lovely....This is a novel I will keep on my bookshelf forever."
-Rebecca Rasmussen, author of The Bird Sisters
"Elegantly written and intensely intimate.... A moving, poetic debut!"
-Marisa de los Santos, bestselling author of Love Walked In and Falling Together
"In her thoroughly enchanting debut, Hall casts a spell with this coming-of-age tale that feels... 'like magic caught and held.'"
-Booklist
"A poignant tale of a daughter strung between two parents and of the kind of silence and secrets that destroy families."
-Kirkus Review
"Hall's lovely and haunting debut...will entrance readers."
-Publisher's Weekly
"A beautifully written debut novel capturing the light and shadow of memory and shared lives. A good choice for book clubs."
-Library Journal
"With writing that is poignant and filled with emotion...this story will stay in the heart for a long time. It's a definite keeper."
-RT Book Reviews, 4 ½ Stars, Top Pick!
"Bold, joyful, carefree...Vivid and beguiling."
-Sacramento Book Review
About the Author
Emylia Hall’s short fiction has appeared in a number of publications, and she was dubbed by Elle magazine (UK) as one of 2012’s three most anticipated debut novelists. She lives in the UK with her husband, who is also an author. The Book of Summers is Emylia’s first novel and is inspired by her childhood memories of vacations spent in rural Hungary.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Hadley Dunn was in Switzerland by accident, really. She'd never imagined that she could study abroad, thinking it was only for fast-tongued linguists, or almond-eyed Parisian pinups, the kind of girls who smoked cigarettes through pouted lips and drank their coffee black. Yet one moment, on a featureless February day, the idea came to her. She might have dismissed it as an idle daydream, but it planted itself with inexplicable solidity and continued to grow.
She had arrived for her seminar early and noticed someone flicking through a brochure for L'Institut Vaudois before class. It was Carla, a girl with a brisk bob and studious oblongs for glasses. She'd talked over Hadley in the last lecture, interrupting her as she'd tried to get to the bottom of the professor's obtuse requests for further reading.
"Are we paired with Lausanne, then?" Hadley asked, as she took the seat next to her.
"Paired? This isn't a school exchange. There's an understanding between our two universities and the English departments. They'll swap a student, just one a year. And it's pronounced 'Low-zan' not 'Law-sahn.'"
"Low-zan. Why only one?"
Carla shrugged, and her mouth pursed.
"No idea, but I can't imagine many people will apply. Switzerland's a really expensive place to live."
"Oh, is it in Switzerland? Cool. Can I see?" asked Hadley, leaning over so that she could get a better look. The picture showed an important-looking building made of glass and chrome, set before a lawn that was neat as a bowling green and fell all the way to the edge of a great lake.
"Don't you live at home still?" said Carla.
"Yes," said Hadley.
Behind the building ran a band of spiked mountains. They were ice-white against the blue of the sky, and looked as though someone had painted them in as an afterthought, a flash of inspiration from a stagehand. Hadley took the brochure from Carla and inspected it closer. Surely no university in the world could be ringed by views like that.
"So, this is just your nearest university? You didn't choose it, as such?"
Hadley finally tore herself from the page and looked up.
"Of course I chose it," she said. "Anyway, what does that have to do with anything?"
As her school friends had headed north and south, east and west, Hadley had stayed where she was. She'd enrolled at her local university, only a short bus ride from where she lived with her parents and little brother in Tonridge. Sam had arrived unexpectedly four years earlier, a bundle of sweetness, hilarity and unending demands. Her mum's laughter lines ran deeper than ever these days, and her dad's hair had turned a heavily seasoned salt-and-pepper. If she'd left home, they would have felt her absence acutely. Who would have shifted the peas on Sam's plate so that they made a smiley face, or helped start a snail farm in the bottom of a bucket? Not to mention all the babysitting. When Hadley read the letters from her far-flung friends, she saw between the lines. For all the tales of late-night fun, skipped lectures, easy love and easier lust, there were stacks of unwashed dishes in communal sinks, inane conversation over squares of toast, and life lived in an all-seeing goldfish bowl; she told herself these weren't the things to tempt her away from home in the name of supposed freedom, and most of the time she believed it.
"I'm just saying," said Carla, "you have to be adventurous to study abroad."
"It'd be an amazing adventure."
"And it doesn't suit everyone."
Hadley suppressed a smile. "You mean it wouldn't suit me?" she said.
She might not have yearned for a wider world, but that didn't mean she never wondered about it. She observed the other students, the ones who drove themselves to campus at the start of term, their backseats loaded with bent lamps and potted palms, or walked from the train station, weighted by rucksacks, arms still tanned from some foreign adventure; these people seemed to blow in from another world entirely, and they struck her as curious. They seemed to be already fully formed, passing effortlessly from school, through university and then into the rest of their freewheeling lives. Beside them, Hadley felt the novice, her lack of experience as glaring as a white sheet. She had an easy faith, however, that exciting things would happen to her one day. And when that day came, she'd be ready.
Behind her glasses Carla's eyes were mud-brown and unblinking. She didn't answer Hadley's question; instead she gave a prim little smile and clicked her fingers for the brochure. Hadley stared at her. She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. She handed the brochure back reluctantly, and Carla returned it to her bag. The professor, a crowlike man who always smelled of egg sandwiches and old coffee, sloped into the room and fumbled with his briefcase at the front of the class. Hadley opened a can of Coke and settled back into her seat. He began to talk about the Victorians and the Industrial Revolution, but she was hardly listening. She was thinking about the mountains, and what it would be like to live so close to them, and whether they'd make any sound at all, because how could something that massive loom silently? Wouldn't there be cracks and whispers and whistling winds? Would you grow used to it, that stolid, eternal presence, and carry on with life as if it was ordinary? A different kind of ordinary, but ordinary nonetheless. More likely you'd spend all day gazing skyward, happy as a mayfly.
A week later, just as the department secretary was counting the last of the applications to study abroad, Hadley tossed hers into the pile.
"The deadline was 5:00 p.m., I'm afraid," she said, glancing up. Her expression was unreadable. The shutters were drawn over her eyes.
"Seriously?" said Hadley. "But it's only half past."
"Rules are rules."
Hadley sank her head onto the countertop. The secretary shifted her cup of tea and carried on flicking through the paperwork, first extracting her form as though it were a weed.
"It's just, I've spent the last week deciding if I wanted to apply or not," Hadley said, "I never thought anything could be so exciting and terrifying at the same time."
In front of her the papers were still being shuffled, stacks of neat handwriting, no doubt full of professions of suitability and promises of exceptional academic achievement. Carla had been wrong about no one wanting to apply.
"I thought that there was no way I could afford it," she said, "but then I found out that there were grants available, so that made me rethink everything." Hadley laid her hand on the secretary's arm and felt her flinch beneath her light touch. "Please," she went on, "I mean, I suddenly realized that I really do want to go. I probably won't get picked, but I want to at least try. I filled out the form as quickly as I could. Look, the Wite-Out is still drying."
There was a moment's silence. Along the hall, doors were slamming, signaling the end of the day.
"What if I just slip itin to the pile?" said Hadley. "We can pretend it's been there all along."
"Oh, quickly, then," the secretary said without looking up.
Hadley flung her arms up and leaned over the counter, offering a messy sort of hug.
The older lady stayed as stiff as a rod. "Don't make me change my mind," she said.
Three weeks later Hadley received a letter, of no more than four or five typewritten lines, telling her that her application had been successful. It took a moment for the news to sink in. Just like that, she'd swapped a year at home for a year abroad. A path had been laid out for her, and she had been happy enough staying on it; would so sudden and dramatic a swerve change the course of Fate? She didn't rush to accept her place. She wondered if she'd been right to want it.
It was her mum who finally convinced her to go. They were washing up together one night after dinner when Had-ley stopped and stared out the kitchen window. The view was of the house next door, line after line of perfect brickwork. The pointed tops of a wooden fence broke the rhythm at neat intervals. Her mum squeezed her hand.
"Sorry, I was miles away," said Hadley, with a smile. She returned her attention to the dirty dishes.
"We never want to hold you back," her mum said.
"But you don't____" she began.
"Hadley, look at me. Sometimes I don't know what your dad and I would have done without you. But Sam starts school in September. Everything changes."
"I know. I've thought about that."
"There's a whole world out there," she said, looking into her eyes with pearly intent. "Perhaps it's time to take it. Take it with both hands, and don't regret anything for a minute."
Sometimes it turned out that people delivered their most important words when they were wearing splattered aprons, their hands awash with soapsuds.
At the airport her mum pressed her into a tight hug, her hair snarling in Hadley's earrings, their tears switching cheeks. Sam handed her a scribbled drawing of a stick girl and a roly-poly snowman with a string of podgy mountains in the background; Hadley dropped a kiss on it before folding it carefully away. Her dad insisted on carrying her cases, wanting to be useful until the last. He promised that they would save up for a visit in the summer, at which point Hadley's mum broke into a song from The Sound of Music. Thereafter followed a deliberately chirpy argument about whether the film was set in Austria or Switzerland, and Hadley's dad admitted to a crush on Julie Andrews. In the end the last boarding call for Geneva rattled over the speakers, and she knew she had to go. She turned one last time to catch her family waving vigorously. She had the distinct feeling that she was breaking some small thing, a binding thread that would stretch tauter and tauter until it gave up, just because it had to. She waved and waved, then pelted for the plane.
Once in her seat, Hadley took a breath and sank back into the silence of the skies. She turned the name Lausanne over and over, and it rolled across her tongue like a new kiss. It was her secret city, for hardly anyone had heard of it. Even Carla had admitted as much at the end of term, as she'd wished Hadley bon voyage with surprising grace. Then she had ruined it, in one deft move. "All I can think," she said, "is that perhaps it's not as nice as it looks."
It was late afternoon, and the September sun was still burning brightly, filling the train carriage with summer's last light. From Geneva to Lausanne the railway tracks followed the length of Lac Léman's shore. Hadley caught flashes of glistening water and saw the purple outlines of mountains rising behind. To the other side were sweeping vineyards and fields of swollen pumpkins. Now and again she saw a boxy château with closed shutters and high gates, and hillsides peppered with chalets, their pointed roofs and wooden verandas making them look like children's toys.
She regarded her fellow passengers with interest; a young backpacker with a scraggy beard was peeling an apple with a penknife; an elderly lady with a fallen beehive was sitting with a bat-eared bulldog curled in her lap; two suited business types, with the same dark sheen to their hair and their shoes, were hiding behind their newspapers. However fleeting, these were the people of her new life, and she felt drawn to each one of them. She was already gathering everything she saw, like a collector of curiosities who finds even the ordinary to be notable.
After less than an hour, the train rolled into Lausanne's station. Hadley stared at the white letters set on a blue sign. Lausanne. She had been here so many times before, if only in her imagination, that when the moment came she almost forgot to get off. She started, scrambled for her case and jumped down onto the platform. With impeccable punctuality the guard blew his whistle, and Hadley turned to watch the departing train. She imagined it continuing along the lake's shore, whipping into the mountains, spinning ever closer to the Italian border for it was bound for Milano Centrale. Other places that perhaps one day she would visit, too. She glanced again at the sign beside her, Lausanne. Already the name was more than just a collection of letters. She felt a prickle of anticipation, swiftly followed by a woollier, less distinct feeling. It was the sense that as long as she stayed just where she was, at the threshold of new experience, all would remain glorious. Nothing would ever be ruined.
The city was sizzling in the lingering heat of summer. Had-ley dutifully wore the padded jacket that had been a parting gift from her parents, and it swaddled her, making perspiration dot her brow. She resolved to buy a chicer mackintosh for the autumn, the neatly belted kind the two women were wearing who passed her in the station forecourt. They'd clattered across the marbled floor, their lips moving prettily as they said words like vraiment, absolument, exclaiming and reasserting with panache. There was something about the French language, words were never just words; they seemed to change the air around them.
On her head, Hadley wore a knitted beret. It was another gift from her parents, but closer to the mark this time. Just like one of those film stars! her mum had cried as Hadley had tried it on. She'd twirled the shorter pieces of her hair so they'd clung to her cheeks in sculpted fashion. "I might get it cut," she'd said, "c'est plus chic, comme ga." She'd braved the hairdresser on the high street, with a picture torn from a magazine clasped in her hand. It had been the girl from the film Breathless-A Bout de Souffle. When she'd gotten home, Sam had thrown himself on the floor laughing and said she looked like a boy. But she'd felt light and mischievous. It was a haircut to cause trouble in, and to smile about it afterward.
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Beautifully written!
By WRB
The Swiss Affair is definitely geared to the young adult or college age readers. This is the story of Hadley Dunn, a young woman's coming of age, and her one year of self-discovery while she is abroad. I must say, I had my doubts that I was not going to enjoy this book. But, what a pleasant surprise! Emylia Hall has crafted a beautifully written novel with her descriptive writing. She certainly paints a picture with words - lush descriptions of the scenery in Lausanne - I felt like I was there. And she does a marvelous job getting into the hearts and minds of the characters.
Hadley Dunn was going to be spending her second year of college abroad in Lausanne, Switzerland. French was to be the common language for a year. Lausanne, very elegant and stylish, appears to be a place of privilege. She was far from home, no one knew her, and she was feeling a sense of freedom.
Hadley soon meets the very exotic Kristina Hartmann and they connect from the beginning. Kristina's whole being glowed with sophistication and Hadley was impressed with her, never knowing anyone like her. Kristina is involved in a secret relationship that she's not able to be completely honest about, but this makes her even more interesting in Hadley's eyes.
Joel wilson is an American professor teaching American Literature, specialism - Hemingway. He is twice Hadley's age, but she finds herself attracted to him. Joel seems to be harboring some dark secrets and Hadley's life is about to change quickly. There are many Hemingway references made through Joel's character, which added interest and dimension to the storyline.
Hugo Bezier, a favorite character, is an elderly writer who has lost his zeal for writing. Hadley often chooses Hugo's company over her friends and their friendship helps to renew Hugo's interest in writing.
Hadley experiences first love, friendship, tragedy, and loss, and it changes her into a different person. She discovers that in Lausanne she has never been sadder, but also never been happier. And the story unfolds ---
I highly recommend this very poignant and coming of age novel for college readers. Superbly done! 5 stars.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from Harlequin through NetGalley in exchange for and honest review.
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
A well-crafted and evocative novel
By Trudie Barreras
This novel was an absolutely perfect read for a chilly winter afternoon when I had no desire to do anything but cuddle up with a good book. It would perhaps have been even better if I'd been snowbound in a cozy mountain cabin, but Hall's descriptions of Lausanne and the surrounding scenery were evocative enough that they really didn't need supplementation.
From my perspective, this story is exceedingly well-crafted. As already mentioned, the place descriptions are glorious, and add a great deal of richness to the narrative. The characterizations are extremely effective, especially of Hadley and Kristina, although Hugo as the main "supporting actor" is wonderfully intriguing. The plot is delicately nuanced, and develops suspense without overplaying it. The emotional and psychological aspects likewise ring true without being unduly belabored. There are no real villains here, but there is great tragedy, as must always be true when a young life is lost pointlessly. And as always, there is more than enough guilt to go around, as several characters are overwhelmed by their own probable contributions to the tragic event.
There is an interesting section at the end called a "Reader's Guide" with possible discussion questions if the book is used as part of a book-club study, as well as a rather nice "Conversation" with the author. Both of these should prove of value to readers who desire more than brief entertainment.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Interesting beginning, nicely wrapped up ending, slogged through the middle....
By endlesswonderofreading
In which I have immense wanderlust part deux. So, lately I've been reading books about different locations than mine, mainly because I'm so friggin' sick of my current location and really, really, really want to travel. So, in preparation for my travels (or to curb the feeling of wanting to leave now, and now, and NOW!), I keep wanting to read fiction books taking place in different countries. The book, Abroad brought me to Italy and now The Swiss Affair takes me to Switzerland. And man, was I taken with Switzerland.
The Good: The backdrop of the The Swiss Affair was so magnificent. You can tell that the author traveled to Lausanne, just as you can tell that she fell in love with Lausanne. And that, in turn, made me fall in love with that city (so much that although Switzerland wasn't in my travel itinerary, it has now topped the list). In fact, the author's description of Switzerland were what made me finish this book. It all just seemed so illustrious and beautiful. The author gets many, many points for transporting me to a wonderful place.
More Good: I really liked the friendship between Hadley and Kristina. However, I adored the friendship between Hadley and Hugo. I loved that although Hugo knew nothing of Kristina and little about Hadley, he still encouraged her to find the truth and even helped her out with it.
The meh: The middle half of The Swiss Affair was a slog to get through. The beginning was interesting, and while I was so happy to see the end, I feel like it still wrapped up nicely. But my God, that middle! I felt as though I was reading a different story than what was described in the synopsis. During the meh-like middle, Hadley did next to nothing to find out what happened to Kristina. She just spent it all shacking up with her professor (which is something that I absolutely hate in EVERYTHING!). I get that it's published by Harlequin and therefore there has to be romance, but I just didn't like THIS romance. I guess that's because I didn't like Joel. And I didn't like Joel because he was Hadley's professor and was taking advantage of that.
So overall, I found The Swiss Affair to be just okay. I was vacillating between two and three stars but I'm feeling generous and I really did love the descriptions of Switzerland, so it gets three. And despite the nicely wrapped up ending, I still don't feel as though this book was deserving of the slogging I went through in the middle. It never fully recovered from that for me. However, I'm still intending on reading The Book of Summers because I really want to be transported to Hungary and I'm sure the author's descriptions of Hungary are as beautiful as they are of Switzerland.
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