Big Swiss Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Updated on October 5, 2026

Verdict: A genuinely funny, critically adored literary dark comedy about a woman who falls for a stranger whose therapy sessions she has been typing up, undercut by a romance many readers never believe in and a narrator whose offhand racist remarks the book rarely challenges.

Best for: Readers who want sharp, strange literary fiction with a sapphic affair at its centre, who enjoy an unreliable, chaotic heroine, and who are happy to trade a satisfying love story for voice, jokes and a long look at trauma.

Heat level: ★★★☆☆ (3/5 — open door, per romance.io)

Rating: ★★★☆☆ (3.4/5 — a 3.68 Goodreads average across roughly 169,400 ratings, with nine critical raves set against a reader base that splits hard on the heroine and the chemistry)

Tropes: Secret identity, obsession, age gap, affair with a married woman, morally grey heroine, older woman/younger woman, small town, found family, bisexual characters, dark comedy.

Big Swiss is Jen Beagin’s third novel and a standalone from Scribner, a piece of literary, character-driven fiction set in Hudson, New York, in which a 45-year-old transcriptionist who knows every secret a married stranger has told her sex coach recognises that stranger’s voice at the dog park and decides not to mention it, turning a fling into an age-gap affair built on a lie.

The data is unusually loud and unusually divided. Goodreads shows a 3.68 average across roughly 169,400 ratings, with about 60% of readers giving four or five stars and about 10% giving one or two. The critics are near-unanimous the other way: Book Marks logs nine raves and five positive reviews, Kirkus reviewed it warmly, and it was nominated for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Big Swiss About?

This is literary fiction first and a love story second, and the order matters. Romance readers who find it through a sapphic list will meet a book that cares far more about one woman’s damage than about whether two women end up together. It is also a comedy of a gentrifying Hudson Valley town, wellness jargon and a sex coach who calls himself Om.

Greta is the whole engine. She is 45, recently out of a ten-year engagement, living rent-cheap in a collapsing eighteenth-century farmhouse with her friend Sabine, a hive of bees and her dog Piñon, and she has spent most of her life not dealing with a childhood loss. Flavia, the client Greta privately calls Big Swiss, is a married gynecologist in her late twenties with trauma of her own and a habit of saying exactly what she thinks. The book stays tight in Greta’s third-person point of view, interleaved with the transcripts she types, so the reader always knows more than Flavia does. That gap is the source of both the comedy and the dread.

What Makes This Sapphic Literary Dark Comedy Work

The humour: This is the one point critics and readers agree on. The Los Angeles Times called it “one of the funniest books of the last few years,” and reader reviews keep returning to the same words: darkly funny, witty, unexpected.
The transcript device: Greta’s running commentary on the sessions she types is the most-cited pleasure in reader reviews, and it lets the book deliver Flavia’s history in her own voice while Greta interrupts it.
The premise as moral trap: An affair with a married woman is the forbidden love on the surface, but the real transgression is what Greta already knows. Reviewers describe watching the lie grow as compulsive and uncomfortable in equal measure.
Trauma without a trauma plot: The Cut called it refreshingly anti-trauma-plot, and Autostraddle praised how it refuses to flatten either woman’s history into a lesson. Kirkus calls Greta wonderfully off-kilter.
The setting: The bee-infested farmhouse, the dog, the donkeys and the town’s moneyed wellness crowd come up again and again as the atmosphere readers remember.

Book Synopsis

Greta makes her living transcribing recorded sessions for Om, a self-styled sex and relationship coach in Hudson whose clients are identified only by their initials. One client is different. A young, precise, painfully frank woman with a Swiss accent, she arrives with a husband, a career, a clean surface and a confession that she has never once enjoyed sex. Greta nicknames her Big Swiss and starts looking forward to her sessions more than anything else in her week.

Then Greta hears that voice in the flesh, at the local dog park. The woman is Flavia, and she has no idea who Greta is. Greta has every chance to explain that she has already heard Flavia talk about her marriage, her body and the worst thing that ever happened to her. She says nothing. Instead she lets a friendship start, then lets it turn into something else, and finds herself more alive with Flavia than she has felt in years.

At home the farmhouse is falling apart, Sabine has problems of her own, and the sessions keep coming. Every week Greta types up what Flavia tells Om, including what Flavia tells Om about Greta. The lie becomes harder to hold and easier to justify, and Greta’s own buried history begins to press up through the jokes. The question the book keeps asking is not whether Flavia will find out but what Greta will have turned into by the time she does.

My Review

The premise is the best thing here, and Beagin knows it. A woman who has heard a stranger’s most private confessions and then meets her by accident is a perfect comic set-up and a perfect ethical bomb at once, and the book wrings both out of it. The transcripts are the cleverest device in the novel. They let Flavia speak for herself, unfiltered, while Greta heckles from the margins, and the result is a love interest you get to know through a keyhole.

The second strength is the voice. Beagin writes Greta with the timing of a stand-up and the self-loathing of someone who has never been to therapy herself, and that combination is why so many critics reached for the word funniest. The Hudson satire lands too, and even the farmhouse is a joke that keeps paying off until it quietly stops being one.

Where it struggles is the romance, and that is not my private gripe. The most repeated complaint in the low-star reader reviews is that Greta and Flavia have no chemistry, that the attraction is asserted rather than felt, and that the book spends a long stretch before the affair properly starts. Stacked behind that come three more. Several readers find the plot directionless once the set-up is spent. A smaller but persistent group calls the ending rushed or anticlimactic, while one prominent critic thought it too neat. And a recurring objection, raised on Goodreads, StoryGraph, TikTok and at least one book blog, is Greta’s casual racist commentary, which reviewers say the novel treats as part of her charm rather than something it examines.

The expectation to reset is the shelf it sits on. Big Swiss turns up on sapphic BookTok lists and age-gap roundups, including ours, but it is not a romance and it does not end like one. If you are coming for the love story, calibrate: the affair is the engine, not the destination. If “literary” is what worried you, relax, because this is one of the most readable, joke-dense literary novels on the sapphic shelf.

My honest note: A brilliant premise and a brilliant voice in service of a romance that never quite convinces. If you need to believe in the couple, this will frustrate you; if you can read it as a portrait of one gloriously broken woman, it is one of the funniest sapphic novels of the decade.

Element	In Big Swiss
Central relationship	Greta & Flavia (“Big Swiss”) — a 45-year-old transcriptionist and the married client in her late twenties whose sessions she types
Core tropes	Secret identity, obsession, age gap, affair, morally grey heroine, dark comedy
Setting	Hudson, New York — a crumbling eighteenth-century farmhouse full of bees, and a gentrifying wellness town
Heat level	3/5 — open door, per romance.io
Series	Standalone; no HEA — the ending is ambiguously hopeful rather than romantic
Content notes	Suicide and suicidal thoughts, death of a parent, past violence and sexual assault, infidelity, stalking, drug use and addiction, animal injury, racist remarks by the narrator

How Spicy Is Big Swiss?

romance.io places Big Swiss at 3 of 5, its “open door” band, from a small base of 65 ratings, since the site is built for genre romance rather than literary fiction. Readers broadly agree with that number. The sex is on the page and frank, often awkward and frequently funny, and desire is a constant subject because the whole book orbits a sex coach’s practice. It is not long, lingering erotica, and nobody reads it for the scenes; reviewers who mention them talk about honesty rather than heat.

The thing worth flagging in advance is consent of a different kind: Flavia never agrees to be known the way Greta knows her, which is what makes the affair uncomfortable. If obsession is the draw, our possessive and obsessive sapphic romance list covers the genre-romance version. Flavia’s history also includes a violent assault, discussed in her sessions. No reviewer I found flags anything more graphic than that. For the same open-door band with a similar comic edge, see our reviews of Milk Fed and Perfume & Pain.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you read literary fiction for voice and jokes, you like a heroine who makes terrible choices and knows it, you want queer desire written frankly and without polish, and you are comfortable with a book that takes trauma seriously while laughing at almost everything else.

You may want to skip it if: you need to believe in the couple, you want a clear happy ending, you need a likeable narrator, or casual racist remarks from a protagonist will pull you out of the book however the author intends them.

In short: a great comic novel about a woman falling apart, and a weak romance about two women falling in love.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

Big Swiss is not a new book finding its first readers; it is a 2023 literary novel still collecting them. Its Goodreads count has kept climbing to roughly 169,400 ratings and 28,800 reviews, and it was a 2023 Goodreads Choice Awards nominee for Readers’ Favorite Fiction. Time put it on its 100 must-read books of 2023 and NPR on its best books of the year. HBO announced a limited series in March 2022 with Jodie Comer attached to star, produced with A24 and Adam McKay’s Hyperobject Industries, but I found no premiere date, and an earlier version of this page wrongly said the adaptation had already aired. TikTok has steady organic content, including a thread of readers discussing the racism in it, but I found no single viral moment and no substantial Reddit thread. The audiobook is a full-cast production from Simon & Schuster Audio led by Rebecca Lowman, with Carlotta Brentan, Stephen Graybill, Joy Osmanski and Matt Pittenger, running about 11 hours 16 minutes, and Goodreads reviewers repeatedly single out the narration.

Prefer audio? Listen to Big Swiss on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The humour comes first, and “funny” is the recurring word in nearly every positive review. Second is Greta herself: readers who love the book love her precisely because she is a mess, and describe the characters as flawed in a way that feels real rather than sanded down. Third is the transcript device and the dog, Piñon, who is named fondly in an unusual number of reviews. The critics add a fourth: a treatment of trauma that refuses tidy healing arcs. Even readers who disliked the romance often say the prose kept them reading.

What readers argue about and complain about: The chemistry, above everything. The loudest low-star theme is that the central pair never sparks and that the book takes too long to get to the affair it is selling. Second, the plot: several readers say things happen without anything really happening, and the Chicago Review of Books, otherwise positive, flagged a growing aimlessness and jokes used to dodge feeling. Third, Greta’s racist asides, named on Goodreads, StoryGraph, TikTok and in at least one blog review, which some readers call extreme and unchallenged. Fourth, the ending, which some call rushed and the 2024 Tournament of Books judge, who sent it out in round one, found too neatly symbolic. The genuine split is Greta: one reviewer calls her irredeemable, and many others call her the reason to read it.

The standalone question worth asking first: Big Swiss is complete in itself, and the affair does not end in a happily ever after; romance.io tags it as a nontraditional HEA, and the ending lands on Greta rather than the couple. If you finish it wanting more of Beagin’s voice, her two earlier novels about Mona, Pretend I’m Dead (2018) and Vacuum in the Dark (2019), share the dark comedy but are not sapphic romances.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Big Swiss a romance?

Not in the genre sense. It is literary fiction with a sapphic affair at its centre, and the affair does not end in a happily ever after. romance.io tags it as a nontraditional HEA.

How spicy is Big Swiss?

A 3/5. romance.io places it in its open-door band; the sex is on the page and frank but often played for awkwardness or comedy rather than heat.

Is Big Swiss sapphic?

Yes. The central relationship is between Greta and Flavia, both women, and the book was nominated for the 2024 Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction.

Is there a Big Swiss TV show?

Not yet on screen. HBO announced a limited series in March 2022 with Jodie Comer attached to star, produced with A24 and Hyperobject Industries, but no premiere date has been announced that I could find.

Is there an audiobook of Big Swiss?

Yes. Simon & Schuster Audio released a full-cast audiobook led by Rebecca Lowman, running about 11 hours 16 minutes, and reviewers often praise the narration.

If You Loved Big Swiss, Read These Next

The closest match is Milk Fed, another darkly funny literary novel about appetite, therapy-speak and a woman falling for someone she should not, at the same open-door heat. Perfume & Pain swaps Hudson for literary Los Angeles but keeps the messy, self-sabotaging narrator and the jokes. And if it was the secret at the heart of the affair that hooked you, Fingersmith builds an entire novel out of a woman who knows more than her lover does. For quieter literary sapphic fiction, try our Sunburn review.

For more, browse our literary and character-driven lesbian fiction reading list, our guide to age gap lesbian books beyond romance, or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Big Swiss wants to be a comedy, a portrait of trauma and a love story at once, and it manages two of the three. The premise is irresistible, the transcripts are a genuinely clever device, and the voice is as funny as the critics promised. But the romance never fully convinces, the plot loses its shape once the set-up is spent, and Greta’s racist asides go largely unexamined. For readers who want sharp, strange literary fiction and can take a chaotic heroine on her own terms, it is well worth the trip; for readers who need the couple to work, look elsewhere. Check Big Swiss on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Big Swiss ranks as a critically acclaimed sapphic literary dark comedy — razor-funny and fearless about trauma, held back by an unconvincing romance and a heroine readers either adore or abandon, and best approached as a portrait of Greta rather than a love story.