“The Gustav Sonata” tells the story of Gustav Perle and his friend Anton Zwiebel, who grow up as boys around 1950 in the Swiss town of Matzlingen. Gustav lives with his embittered mother in a small apartment. Together, they struggle to make ends meet. Anton, by contrast, comes from a wealthy family and is prepared by his parents to become a concert pianist. Through a flashback, we learn how Gustav’s mother met his father, Erich, a police officer who, during the Second World War, falsified the entry dates on the passports of Jewish refugees to allow them to stay in Switzerland. The act cost him both his job and his marriage. In a flash-forward to the 1990s, the story follows Gustav and Anton into adulthood as their friendship falters and ultimately transforms into love.

“Fly Away, Pigeon” is a novel about the Serbian-Hungarian Kocsis family, who relocated from Vojvodina in Serbia (then part of Yugoslavia) to Zürich, Switzerland, in the 1970s. The book follows several generations of this family as they build new lives in Zurich, running a successful café through hard work and integration, while cherishing their cultural heritage.

“Melnitz” is a Swiss historical family saga that follows several generations of the Swiss-Jewish Meijer family from 1871 to 1939. The novel begins in the 19th century in the small Swiss village of Endingen and concludes several generations later, shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War, when the family has become prosperous in cities such as Baden and Zürich.

In Muriel Spark’s novella “The Finishing School”, Rowland Mahler and his wife, Nina Parker, are running a private post-secondary school in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva, where they teach courses such as ‘creative writing’ and ‘étiquette’. In addition to his teaching and his efforts to keep creditors at bay, Rowland’s great ambition is to become a successful author. To his frustration, one of his students, Chris Wiley, appears to be more talented and more likely to achieve literary success.

“Sweet Days of Discipline” explores the tense relationships between teenage girls – and the narrator’s naive infatuation with another girl – at a boarding school in 1950s Switzerland. When Frédérique, a new student, arrives at the school, Eva, the narrator, is attracted by her charm and intelligence, and is determined to become her best friend.

Edith Hope, an English writer of romance novels, stays in a hotel on Lake Geneva during the off-season to escape a scandal she caused back home in London. At the Swiss hotel, she quietly observes the other guests – particularly the women – but also the charming Mr Neville…

Ambrosio is a Spanish guest worker (Gastarbeiter) on a Swiss farm, where he tends to the cows of farmer Knuchel. Later in the novel, he works in a nearby slaughterhouse, where he encounters Blösch – once a prized dairy cow at the Knuchel farm, now a sad animal facing an undignified end.

After the death of his father, Jean Calmet, a Swiss teacher of Latin in Lausanne, believes he will finally be free to live his own life. However, he soon finds himself haunted by the feeling that his late father keeps watching his actions, thoughts, and desires, leaving him consumed by guilt and shame.

“Belle du Seigneur” tells the story of Solal, a Greek-Jewish diplomat and high-ranking official at the League of Nations in 1930s Geneva, who embarks on a passionate love affair with Ariane, a Swiss woman married to his colleague Adrien Deume.

“The Spirits of the Earth” is a family saga about a wealthy Swiss family whose fortune begins to dwindle, set on the shores of Lake Geneva during the interwar period. The story revolves around César, the eldest son who divides his time between the two family-estates where his younger brothers live with their families. Secretly, he longs for a family of his own, while his brothers and their wives worry about what will happen should César marry and claim his share of the inheritance.