In the wonderfully bizarre world of Big Swiss, 45-year-old Greta moves into a decaying 18-century house filled with maggots, spiders and rapidly dying bees. While working as a transcriptionist for a sex therapist and wannabe author, she becomes obsessed with one of his clients, who she nicknames Big Swiss. The novel promises to have interesting things to say about trauma. Greta, whose mother committed suicide when she was a teenager, lives in utter chaos; Big Swiss, who was brutally assaulted in her twenties, pushes everything down and lives a pristine, privileged life. An interesting dichotomy that was, unfortunately, cast aside in favour of a hundred sex jokes. This novel did make me laugh; I can see why people love it. But ultimately, the heart of it got lost in the ridiculousness, and I found myself wondering what the hell I had just read – and not necessarily in a good way. MG

Faber & Faber